PCS to Corporate America

The November 2026 Career Conference is in full swing, and we are bringing back one of our top episodes. Joel Junker, Senior Vice President and Partner of Cameron-Brooks, sat down with special guest Frances Cole Jones, the author of How to Wow:  Proven Strategies for Selling Your (Brilliant) Self in Any Situation. In this episode, they address the following question: How can a junior military officer impress a corporate recruiter?

Here’s a note from Joel about his key takeaways:

Junior Military Officers (JMOs) are taught to be calm under pressure, to stay even keeled and be short and to the point when speaking with superiors.  While this style is important as a JMO leader, it does not translate well to interviewing. During an interview, recruiters really want to get to know a candidate. A big part of what a corporate recruiter thinks of a candidate is how the candidate made them “feel”.  That feeling is an emotional connection.

I spend a lot of time interview coaching candidates on bringing out personality with body language and tone of voice.  In 2016, I looked for books and other tools to help candidates and I came across Frances Cole Jones the author of How to Wow:  Proven Strategies for Selling Your (Brilliant) Self in Any Situation  She is often a guest on the podcast, “The Art of Manliness”, sharing her expertise on communication, body language and presenting your best self.  I was so impressed with Frances, I wrote about her work on our blog in 2016. 

Her website has an Ask a Question section and claims she answers them personally.  So, I boldly asked her to be a guest on The Cameron-Brooks Podcast.  The next day, she sent me a response with a resounding “Yes”, telling me that her nephew is a JMO in the Navy, her spouse is a former Marine and her brother is a former Air Force (I think I got all of that right).

One of the topics Frances and I covered in our podcast is Albert Mehrabian’s study on how we influence people.  Mehrabian is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA and he found that the effectiveness of our communication (or influence) is 7% verbal, 38% tone of voice, and 55% body language.  I asked Frances to be on the podcast to discuss the study and share tips on how JMOs can improve their own body language and tone of voice during interviews. She covers many tips during the podcast, but there were two I particularly liked.

I want to thank Frances for her time and expertise.  I thoroughly enjoyed learning from her and I hope you do as well.

Joel Junker

Since his discussion with Frances, Joel has incorporated these tips on how to impress a corporate recruiter into each Career Conference. By applying these tips, along with the preparation and coaching they receive through the Cameron-Brooks program, officers have found great success.

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Or call us at 210-874-1500 or email [email protected].

If you’re a current or former military officer, there is a strong chance you have a copy of Meditations, The Enchiridion, or Admiral Stockdale’s writings on your bookshelf. Stoicism has many applications to life as a military officer.

But how can it help you with your military transition? Stoicism helps your military transition by separating what you control from what you do not. You cannot control the hiring market or whether an interviewer nods along while you answer. You can control your preparation, your mindset, and the quality of your work, and that is where every productive decision in a career search gets made.

Geoff Fries joined Cameron-Brooks as a transition coach in August 2025 after ten years as a Navy pilot. He read his way through the stoics during his own transition. In episode 245, Geoff sits down with Maddie Reese to discuss how stoicism can help officers during their military transitions. Below, you’ll find a 4-step guide to how Stoicism can help with your military transition and influence your timeline.

Preparation beats reaction. Begin before you need to.

Roger Cameron, our founder, told officers to go sit on a rock and think. That wisdom still holds.

Decide what matters to you and your family before anyone asks you to rank companies or cities. Write it down. The goal is not a perfect plan. The goal is a clear one.

This is also where you sort what you control from what you do not.

Epictetus called this the dichotomy of control. He used dice to explain it. You cannot control the numbers that come up. You play the hand you rolled. He could not control being born into slavery. He controlled what he read, what he wrote, and how he responded.

Make two lists.

Things you do not control: the economy, which companies are hiring for which roles, whether an interviewer is having a good day.

Things you control: your preparation, what you read, the questions you ask.

Spend your energy on the second list. You can’t control the first list, but you can choose how you respond to it. Officers who skip this step spend the next year reacting to opportunities instead of choosing between them.

Courage in the stoic sense is not the version from the movies.

It is the willingness to become a beginner again. To walk into a new field in front of people who haven’t seen your leadership in action and be a sponge.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that the impediment to action advances action. The obstacle in the way becomes the way.

At the 12 month mark, that means choosing the harder path on purpose. Take the assignment that stretches you. Learn the function you do not know. Do not optimize your last year in uniform for comfort.

Courage starts it. Discipline carries it.

Geoff keeps a passage from Meditations in his gym. It is about rising unwillingly in the morning and remembering you were made for action, not for staying warm under the covers. He says it still lands like a slap in the face.

Discipline is consistent, repeatable action toward a result you have defined. Set a weekly cadence and hold it for a year:

Over time, this steady work will compound. We have designed our preparation program with this steady, repeated work and coaching in mind so that when you enter the interview room, you aren’t just ready. You can flourish.

Wisdom is not necessarily knowing a lot. It’s sorting what matters from what does not.

In an interview, that means one thing. Find the problem the hiring manager actually has.

Read the job description for the problem behind it. Ask questions that get at the real issue. Then show how you solve it.

Then there is the room itself.

Geoff tells a story about a candidate who interviewed before joining the military. The hiring manager wrote NO in large block letters on a sheet of paper in full view of the candidate while he was still answering.

That candidate’s takeaway: after that, nothing in an interview could rattle him.

You might come across a disengaged interviewer. Someone might step away from the camera. Someone might play devil’s advocate about your lack of industry experience. Someone might try a negative sell about your hometown.

None of that is yours to control. Your answer is.

Geoff calls it excellence for excellence’s sake. Be a thermostat, not a thermometer. Set the temperature in the room rather than reflecting back what you find there.

The Cameron-Brooks Career Conference runs four and a half days and is scheduled 45 to 60 days before you start transition leave. You will do roughly eight to twelve interviews across two of those days.

Do not carry the whole thing at once.

Geoff breaks it into three-interview chunks. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. By the time you finish lunch you are halfway through and you never had to hold the full event in your head.

This is compartmentalization. You already know how to do it. You did it every time you stepped into an aircraft and left everything else on the ground.

The same principle applies to the whole search.

Geoff brought up something Sam Presti said when a reporter asked how a team repeats as NBA champions. Presti explained that it’s not about chasing a result, but about repeating the process that produced it.

It can be all too easy to fixate on the end state. Which company. Which city. What the offer looks like. Those matter. They are also the part you control least.

Control the process. Excellence becomes a habit, and the result follows from the habit.

No. While people today often associate stoicism with suppressed emotions, classical stoicism is actually about regulating emotion, not eliminating it.

Stoicism in an interview can look like regulating your emotions to deal with nerves, bringing your best self to the interview and focusing on building a genuine connection with the interviewer.

Ideally, start 18 to 24 months before your separation date.

The first six months are for deciding what you want. The next twelve are for building skills, stories, and a clear picture of the business world. The final 45 to 60 days are the Career Conference and the follow-up process.

We have worked with officers who started just three months out and still found great success. However, their timelines were more condensed, with more pressure, and less time for preparation.

Give the best answer you can give and let their behavior be theirs.

You do not know what is happening on their side of the screen. A disengaged interviewer may be distracted, may be testing you, or may be assigned to play the skeptic.

Your job is to raise the level of the room, not to mirror it.

No. The lessons from the podcast and this blog will help, even without studying stoicism yourself.

That said, most officers who pick it up find it familiar immediately. Marcus Aurelius wrote it as a private notebook and never expected anyone else to read it. It reads like a leader working through the same problems you are working through, two thousand years earlier.

At Cameron-Brooks, we help junior military officers transition from the military into rewarding business careers.

See what career fields our candidates move into.

If you’re a company-grade or field-grade officer exploring what’s next, Geoff, the entire Cameron-Brooks team, and I are here to help. Feel free to reach out below. We’re here to listen, answer your questions, and help you decide if this path could be right for you.

Email: [email protected] 

Join us for inside a JMO career conference with three alumni from the August 2026 Cameron-Brooks Career Conference, hosted by Cameron-Brooks career coaches Brock Dudley and Geoff Fries.

Peter Carver and Jonathan Guilbe are both headed to Flowserve, in the nuclear engineering valves division in Raleigh. Bryan Bornn is going to Pacifico Energy in Dallas, building power infrastructure for data centers.

The August 2026 numbers:

We’re fortunate to partner with so many Cameron-Brooks alumni who have gone on to become hiring managers. And many of them, along with their companies, come back to hire more JMOs from the Cameron-Brooks program.

A big part of it comes down to the success of these placements. Great JMOs. Great companies. Proven track records of success and career advancement.

Simply put, companies see firsthand how strong Cameron-Brooks alumni are as leaders, and they want to hire more people like them.

That’s part of what makes Cameron-Brooks so special. It’s not just a network. It’s a community of people who continue to support each other, hire each other, and help the next group of JMOs succeed.

All three landed on the same short list.

The interview prep worksheet. Peter called it the highest-value tool he used. It forces you to pull the competencies out of a job description before you walk in.

Reps with other people. John attended nearly every optional session and met with his study group around them.

Practicing with a real role in mind. Bryan had his regular answers down. He hadn’t practiced them with an actual job description in mind until the conference got close.

The interviews were more conversational than expected. Bryan said practice felt rigid by comparison, and the real thing flowed better.

Location mattered less than they thought it would. John ranked Texas low on his list. He is moving to Dallas. Peter nearly took a role in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a place he had not heard of before the conference.

Their advice was consistent. Focus on the role and the company first. Let location and compensation enter the decision once you have offers in hand.

If you’d like to learn more from other recent alums about their experience, you can listen to the following alumni roundtables:

At Cameron-Brooks, we help junior military officers transition from the military into business careers. If you are thinking about finding a job after the military, we would like to talk.

If you have any questions, we’re happy to help. For those of you in our program, we know how daunting the process up the career conference can be. We are here for you and we’ve got your back. In the meantime, practice in your study groups, stay active in discord, and attend your interview workshops.

And if you’re new to Cameron-Brooks and are looking to explore your transition to the business world, we’re happy to talk.

Follow Cameron-Brooks on LinkedIn.

Twice a year, Joel Junker sits down with our CEO, Chuck Alvarez, to talk about what’s actually happening in the business world and what it means for officers getting out. They’ll be discussing the JMO job market in 2026.

Chuck leads the client side and has been doing this for more than 30 years. Joel leads the candidate side.

This one covers a lot of ground.

Chuck opens with the hard part. Geopolitical tension is as high as he’s seen in his lifetime, and that makes it difficult for companies to plan. But something has shifted. Nobody is holding their breath waiting for it to pass.

For the right person, Chuck says it’s the best market he’s seen.

Two things are driving it. The first is onshoring. He calls it one of the biggest 50-year trends in the US economy, and he’s never seen this level of capital investment in American infrastructure. The second is AI, and not the software side. The concrete, steel, power, and logistics it takes to build all of it.

Both need leaders now.

There’s a catch. Chuck calls it the great mismatch. Companies have openings. Strong candidates are out there. They keep passing each other in the night.

AI screening tools were built for traditional hiring. A junior military officer is non-traditional by definition. You change your industry, your skill set, and your professional network all at once.

Joel talks about officers who submit hundreds of applications and hear nothing. It feels productive. It isn’t.

Chuck and Joel also get into the difference between a comfort path and an investment path, why every search needs a Plan B, and what Roger Cameron once told Roland Smith about maximizing opportunity instead of location.

Chuck closes with the most useful thing in the episode. Companies want performance leadership now, not just people leadership. His challenge to anyone still in uniform: over the next 12 months, build five real examples of using technology to improve something in your unit. Maintenance. Training. Forecasting.

At Cameron-Brooks, we help junior military officers transition from the military into rewarding business careers.

See what career fields our candidates move into.

If you’re a company-grade or field-grade officer exploring what’s next, Joel, the entire Cameron-Brooks team, and I are here to help. Feel free to reach out below. We’re here to help and listen and see if this path could be right for you.

Email: [email protected] 

How can I go from junior military officer to the C-suite?

In interviews, JMOs often get asked where they see themselves in ten or twenty years. The honest answer, the one most people keep to themselves, is often: running the place.

Matt Beliveau actually did it.

He got there by learning a new function from the ground up, staying long enough to build real depth, and understanding the difference between a mentor and a sponsor.

Twenty-five years ago, Matt left the Army and started as an Associate Human Resources Manager at General Mills. Not a VP. Not on a fast track. Learning a brand new function from the ground up.

He stayed at General Mills for 13 years. Then came CHRO roles at Morton Salt, Sara Lee Frozen Bakery, and Del Monte Foods. Today he is Chief Human Resources Officer at TreeHouse Foods.

We’re bringing this conversation back because the lessons in it held up.

What makes the JMO transition so hard?

Matt is direct about this. It isn’t just finding a job in the right city with a good paycheck. Three things change at the same time.

Your identity shifts from military officer to civilian. You learn an entirely new functional role. And you have to read a company culture nobody hands you a manual for.

That’s a lot to carry in year one.

How did he reach the C-suite?

He managed his career on purpose. He found mentors. He also found sponsors, which is a different thing, and he explains why the difference matters more than most people realize.

Matt talks about leading through the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. He compared it to being on deployment. Success came down to staying agile, caring about people, and following through on commitments. Things good JMOs already know how to do.

He also predicted, back then, that work was headed toward more flexibility and hybrid schedules for office roles. Five years later, he called it.

Then Matt shares his leadership lessons, some of the best we’ve had on the show. Those are worth hearing in his own words.

More from this episode:

This episode was recorded while Matt was CHRO at Sara Lee Frozen Bakery. He has since led HR at Del Monte Foods and is now CHRO at TreeHouse Foods.

At Cameron-Brooks, we help junior military officers transition from the military into rewarding business careers.

Want to explore your options? See what career fields our candidates move into.

Curious about your marketability? Let’s talk.

Thirty-seven officers. Three hundred eighty-four interviews across two days.

Two weeks later, most of the officers knew where they were launching their business careers.

In this episode, Cameron-Brooks transition coach Brock Dudley sits down with two recent alums to talk through what the June conference was actually like and what they would tell an officer preparing for August.

– Why Jake went on five follow-up visits and received an offer from every one

Xavier Mallet spent eight years in the Army as an engineer officer, leading a

Jake Sidner served just about five years in the Marine Corps as an air defense

If you’d like to learn more from other recent alums about their experience, you can listen to the following alumni roundtables:

If you have any questions, we’re happy to help. For those of you in our program, we know how daunting the process up the career conference can be. We are here for you and we’ve got your back. In the meantime, practice in your study groups, stay active in discord, and attend your interview workshops.

And if you’re new to Cameron-Brooks and are looking to explore your transition to the business world, we’re happy to talk.

Follow Cameron-Brooks on LinkedIn.

In this episode, Joel Junker sits down with Saša Mirković, author of The Inspire Code, to talk about freedom, the importance of trust and conflict, and how leaders can build teams that can run without them.

Saša’s story doesn’t start in the boardroom. It starts in Sarajevo.

He survived the siege of the city in the 1990s, served two years in the military, and came to the United States after the war. In 1998, he applied to 385 jobs. He got one reply.

He eventually landed at American Express Financial Advisors, worked his way up to VP, and in 2006 started his own practice. Today, the Inspire Confidence Group spans multiple offices, alongside a leadership company and a tax firm.

But the most important lesson in this episode came from a failure.

In 2018, Saša’s business partner left the firm. Eighty percent of the team walked out with him. That was the moment Saša realized he had been talking about leadership without actually building trust.

Trust is the currency of leadership. You can’t lead without it, the same way you can’t run a business without money. And Saša is clear on where it starts: the leader gives trust first. It’s planted, earned, and renewed every day.

Trust is also what makes healthy conflict possible. Saša describes problems like a beach ball. You see one side. Your teammate sees another. Strong teams fight the problem together instead of fighting each other.

Joel and Saša also get into Slack and Flow, Saša’s framework for working smarter: eliminate half of what you do, delegate the rest to technology and to people who love that work, and protect real thinking time every week. It’s how his team doubled the business without adding headcount.

Whether you’re a junior military officer preparing for your transition or a leader building your first civilian team, this one is full of ideas you can use right away.

– The Inspire Code by Saša Mirković (Amazon bestseller! Hardcover now out)

– The Nudge — Saša’s weekly two-minute leadership newsletter, Wednesdays at 5 a.m. ET

– Inspire Network — white papers, Tug Cards, and a complimentary coaching session

At Cameron-Brooks, we help junior military officers transition from the military into rewarding business careers.

See what career fields our candidates move into.

If you’re a company-grade or field-grade officer exploring what’s next, Joel, the entire Cameron-Brooks team, and I are here to help. Feel free to reach out below. We’re here to help and listen and see if this path could be right for you.

Email: [email protected] 

We are bringing you a special encore episode following a truly historic time in America: our 250th birthday. In honor of this milestone, we thought we would talk about another type of founding: the founding of Cameron-Brooks. In this episode, you will hear from our very own Mary Lou White. She is one of the founding members of Cameron-Brooks and has been helping Junior Military Officers transition from the military to Corporate America for over 50 years. Here she will talk about Cameron-Brooks’ history and the history of the military-to-business industry.

A California native, Mary Lou met Roger Cameron and Rene Brooks. Roger and Rene were both working for a company named Career Seminars at that time. The company worked with JMOs but also did other types of recruiting. After Career Seminars underwent a restructuring, Roger and Rene decided to build their own company focused on helping military officers transition to the business world. The rest, as they say, is military-to-corporate history.

Mary Lou takes us on a journey from the early days of Cameron-Brooks, life before technology, and the way things “used to be.”

One key takeaway: although processes, technology, and people have changed along the way, the core mission of Cameron-Brooks has never wavered. Our goal is to change people’s lives by helping them reach their professional goals and dreams.

Thank you, Mary Lou, for your warmth, commitment, and servant’s heart! You have made a tremendous impact on many thousands of officers and their families.

We are proud of the role we’ve played in military-to-corporate history. Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about your transition options.

You can also check out our Transition Guide on “3 Game-Changing Strategies for JMOs Making the Jump to Business” for additional transition tips.

We recommend subscribing to our YouTube channel and following us on LinkedIn to stay connected.

In this episode, Lauren Kordzik sits down with Cameron-Brooks alum George Pesansky to discuss what his 30 years of hiring and building teams taught him about JMOs, and why the best companies keep coming back to hire these great leaders.

George Pesansky came through Cameron-Brooks in 1996 as an Army officer. He didn’t know exactly what was next. He just knew he was ready for something new.

Thirty years later, he’s built a company, hired JMOs, and coached leaders inside some of the most complex manufacturing operations in the world. He wrote a book about it. And he still comes back to the same idea when someone asks what separates good leaders from great ones.

We before me.

It sounds simple. But George will tell you, it’s actually rare.

Most organizations, at some point, start optimizing for individuals. Career paths, visibility, personal outcomes. It’s subtle. But over time, it shapes how decisions get made and how teams show up.

JMOs come from a different culture entirely. The mission is the priority. The team is what matters. Candor isn’t a personality trait; it’s expected. That doesn’t disappear when someone transitions out of the military. It comes with them.

George also pushes back on one of the most common reasons companies hesitate to hire JMOs: they don’t have industry experience.

His take? There’s a difference between knowledge and skill.

Knowledge (a product, a process, a system) can be learned in weeks. Skill (real leadership, the ability to drive results through people, the discipline to do the hard thing) takes years to build. JMOs already have it. Hiring managers sometimes get those two things mixed up.

When you get that hiring decision right, the return isn’t just one good hire. It’s a stronger team. Fewer people walking out the door. A culture people want to stay in.

George saw it firsthand. And he’s watched it play out over and over again in the organizations he’s worked with since.

If you’re looking to hire a JMO for your team, we would love to connect. Feel free to contact us to learn more about attending a Cameron-Brooks Hiring Conference. Or feel free to email Lauren Kordzik at [email protected].

For any JMOs thinking the transition? We’re here to help.

It’s a tale as old as time. You launch your Zoom interview, you’re looking sharp, and you see the hiring mangers on the screen in front of you. And after some brief small talk, the interviewer looks at you and asks, “So, tell me about yourself.”

This deceptively simple question can be a make or break to your interview. It sets the tone and helps build that first impression. So, where do you start? Do you share everything about your background? Should I start with childhood? Just focus on your military accomplishments?

In this podcast, Joel Junker shares his insight on how to answer this very important interview question: “Tell Me About Yourself.”

For this podcast episode, we are doing an encore series where we release original episodes of the PCS to Corporate America podcast to bring them to our new audience. And this episode, just happens to be the most listened to episode in the podcast’s history.

This podcast episode was launched December 30, 2019, pre-pandemic. While the nature of interview and the Cameron-Brooks conferences have changed (read: Zoom for first interviews, instead of in-person), the essence of this interview answer framework stays the same.

If you were ever going to rank people who give interview advice, Joel should be at the very top of your list. Not only did he transition as a JMO and have an outstanding Career Conference, but he also has over 26 years of experience helping literally thousands of military officers transition to Corporate America.

As Career Conference interviews continue to trend toward being more conversational in nature, this podcast will help you develop an effective response when a hiring manager presents you with the interview question “Tell me about yourself.” We dive into why the question is important, the component parts of the answer, tailoring the answer to be specific to different career fields and some do’s and don’ts.

Want more specific advice?

Our archived blog posts are chocked full of other interview advice. You can find a few of our favorites here, here, here and here.

To learn more about turning your JMO leadership skills into a successful transition and business success with Cameron-Brooks, visit our website and check out PCS to Corporate America. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.