Brian Demer joined the Marine Corps in 1997 and spent five years as a CH-53 helicopter mechanic, which he'll tell you is the biggest helicopter in the US arsenal and is built to leak. He won a Sikorsky maintenance award, qualified as a QA inspector, and left in 2002 convinced that the company which built his aircraft would want the man who'd kept it flying. So he moved to West Palm Beach, put on a suit, and drove to the plant with his resume in hand. The security guard at the gate told him they were in the middle of a downsizing and to turn around and get out of here. He did a U-turn and drove home. When he got through to a real person in HR later that day, the question came back: do you have your civilian A&P license? He had to ask what that was. Five years of hands-on experience, a shelf of awards, and nothing a civilian employer could read.

What he did next was pivot into the one thing he knew he was good at, which was talking to people. Enterprise Rent-A-Car led to twelve years in financial services, and somewhere in the middle of that he noticed he kept volunteering to run things. He led a bank acquisition. He rolled out a sales platform to people who didn't want it on an iPad. He wrote what he called a talk strategy, because nobody had told him it was a communications plan. A mentor pointed him at consulting, Deloitte and KPMG auto-declined him, and he only got into Booz Allen Hamilton because a friend put him on the phone with a senior associate who opened by pointing out that he was interrupting a surfing trip. Brian's answer was to ask him what kind of projects he'd want to hear about. The associate started naming them back at him as business process re-engineering and the Kotter model, and Brian, by his own account, said that if it helped him get the job then yes, he'd done all of that. The panel interview went the same way. Three lead associates looked at a banker's resume and couldn't find the words for it, and he couldn't hand them any.

The certification habit started in his first induction class, when somebody put up a slide with fifty certifications on it and he thought: never again. A change management practitioner course came first, then an advanced one at Georgetown, then the PMP® he'd been hearing about from peers who described it as the worst exam of their lives. He went three for three, above target in every domain, and showed the certificate to the supervisor who'd predicted he'd come in below. He's had it four years now, and the whole of his argument for it sits in what the credential did rather than what it says. He's a civilian action officer at the Department of the Air Force these days, working on publications policy he cheerfully describes as the worst thing in his life, and holding it together with a spreadsheet he won't show anyone because it's a Gantt chart and nobody around him would know one. Every few weeks he's at another retirement, having the same conversation with a colonel or a chief who doesn't know what comes next, handing over a list of certifications and telling them the twenty years they already have will clear the requirements. It's the conversation nobody had with him in 2002.

Show notes and After Action Report: https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/006-brian-demer/

All the links from this episode are on that page, plus a two-page After Action Report on the PMP® path you can download: the task and the standard, what counts from your service, what to sustain, what to improve, and Brian's own remarks on earning it.

Jorge Contreras joined the Navy as an aviation maintenance officer and spent his first years aboard the USS Independence, home-ported in Yokosuka. When the ship was decommissioned he moved to a helicopter squadron, and from there back toward the engineering degree he'd started with, into the Civil Engineer Corps. That's the community that builds for both the Navy and the Marine Corps, so the rest of his career was facilities work and contracting: a construction battalion tour that made him a Seabee for exactly two years, a public works assignment overseeing an 11,000-acre site, contingency projects overseas. He was managing money, schedules, people and risk the entire time. What he wasn't doing was calling it project management, and neither was anyone else.

The recognition came later and it came in pieces. He talks about running S-curves and standup meetings and realizing years afterward that both were in a textbook. In naval aviation there was a manual everyone said had been written in blood, because every procedure in it existed because somebody had already done the job the wrong way, and it turned him into a lifelong believer in writing the lessons down. The moment it actually landed was a civilian one. Working on a federal electronic health record program, he heard a colleague refer to a document as an artifact, asked why on earth they were calling it that, and then understood he'd been producing them for twenty years.

He doesn't dress up the part in between. He retired on November 1st, 2015, assumed he was finished, and spent a couple of months discovering he wasn't. The TAP class he attended he describes as a joke. He had no plan, no target job and a ten-page resume, and the thing that rescued him was his wife putting it on Indeed, where a man in Houston read it and recognized somebody who could speak military construction. Within weeks he was running projects in Qatar, Kuwait and Djibouti, a job he took before anybody explained that it had a title. The PMP® came about a decade after he left, taken for credibility and, he says, for the tools and the confidence to do the job properly. Ask whether it made him more competitive and he'll tell you straight that he doesn't know. What he does know is the order he'd do it in next time, and it's the opposite of his own: start a year out, while the military is still paying, and walk out with the certification already in hand.

Show notes and After Action Report: https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/005-jorge-contreras/

All the links from this episode are on that page, plus a two-page After Action Report on the PMP® path you can download: the task and the standard, what counts from your service, what to sustain, what to improve, and Jorge's own remarks on earning it.

Dave Lees graduated high school and went straight into the Air Force as a ground radio technician. He was eighteen. Within a couple of years he'd deployed repeatedly and taken a teaching job at Keesler partly so that he'd stop, and once he got there he rebuilt the capstone exercise, because the people who'd written the old one had been retired for twenty years and had never set up communications in a tent. He bought a couple of carts and some ATVs, then put students on a patch of ground outside the chow hall and had them establish comms with each other over lunch. Nobody called it a project. He picked up a commission, moved across to electronic warfare on the RC-135, and served in the same year group as Michael Shick without ever once deploying alongside him. Later he ran the base OPSEC program and won Air Force Program Manager of the Year for it, largely by asking every squadron to put its continuity books on SharePoint so he could read them from his desk instead of turning up wearing an inspector's hat.

The medical board arrived out of nowhere and it arrived fast. The same week he learned he'd made major and won a school slot, he came in from the backyard unable to see straight, and his blood sugar came back over 800. A reservist up the road put it plainly: the Air Force doesn't want you anymore. He was thirty-five, with a doctorate in leadership already finished and no plan that called for using it this early. What followed was a move to Alabama and a civil service job, and then a run at the PMP® that he's unusually willing to describe. He sat it cold, on the strength of the letters he already had, and missed by two or three questions. He then studied what he thought he'd missed and scored worse. It took a weekend boot camp on his employer's time, and a third attempt.

The argument he builds out of all that is narrower and more useful than most transition advice. He isn't selling the certification as a qualification, he's selling it as a translation. He watched people leave the military and write "I'm a leader, hire me because I'm a leader" on LinkedIn, and points out that he holds a doctorate in leadership and doesn't believe anybody would hire him for that either. What got him hired was being able to say, in words a contract firm already recognized, that he'd run the projects he had in fact run. He now fills an engineering role at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center without an engineering degree, because a chief engineer wanted somebody who knew project management, knew electronic warfare, and could talk to air crew. He reckons he's told about twenty people to go and get a PMP® and that around ten of them did, and the one he keeps coming back to is a bandsman of almost thirty years with a theology degree who was certain he was unemployable.

Show notes and After Action Report: https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/004-dave-lees/

All the links from this episode are on that page, plus a two-page After Action Report on the PMP® path you can download: the task and the standard, what counts from your service, what to sustain, what to improve, and Dave's own remarks on earning it.

Russ Parker was in the Young Marines from the age of ten. He made first sergeant in it, then kept fairly quiet about that once he was actually in the Marine Corps. His father was a Marine and wanted him to go to Parris Island the way he had himself, but he also wanted the college degree he'd never got, so the deal on offer to a seventeen-year-old was the reserves. Parker enlisted as an electro-optical ordnance repair technician, turned up on day one to a room full of talk about resistors, and had to ask what soldering was. Two years later he was in Al Anbar province as the only man with his job in an infantry battalion, riding convoys from base to base to swap a two-battery terminal for a one-battery terminal on every night vision optic he could reach. He was nineteen. Nobody called it a project, and when he got back they made him write up what he'd learned from it.

The commission came partly because a logistics officer told him he couldn't do the job. He did the job and did it well. By the time he made major and was planning exercises in Bahrain, the closest thing to a career plan had arrived through his wife. She'd done project management for the State Department and was studying for her PMP®, and he sat there quizzing her off flashcards recognizing every concept under a different name. He filed that away for about ten years. Then surgery turned into a run of medical conditions, the lieutenant colonel board turned into a medical board, and he found himself at Wounded Warrior Battalion taking personality tests that came back saying he liked solving problems with people and working methodically toward an end state. The woman running the session asked whether he'd ever thought about project management. He took a scrum course, worked out he'd been running Kanban boards for fifteen years without having the word for it, got the PMP®, and added the PMI-RMP® a few months after that.

The argument he makes is that risk isn't a sliver of project management, it's a discipline that got folded into one. He'll point out that a thirty-five hour PMP® prep course spends about two and a half hours on risk, and that a risk course spends thirty. He thinks most organizations accept risk passively, deciding in advance to write a check if it lands, and never pricing what the second and third order effects cost when it does. What he brought out of the Marine Corps is a vocabulary for stopping: the tactical pause, the maintenance stand-down, the day where nobody moves and everyone looks at the plan instead. The lesson underneath it came from a lieutenant colonel who worked out that Parker had built his operations order by running find and replace over a friend's, and asked how he could be trusted to plan a deployment when he couldn't plan a range. Parker's range was in December. His friend's had been in July. It snowed.

Show notes and After Action Report: https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/003-russ-parker/

All the links from this episode are on that page, plus a two-page After Action Report on the PMI-RMP® path you can download: the task and the standard, what counts from your service, what to sustain, what to improve, and Russ's own remarks on earning it.

Stuart Bell was going to join the RAF. He'd done electronics at school, there was an RAF support base down the road that maintained exactly the kind of systems he was interested in, and he'd got two or three rounds into the recruitment testing. Then his mother spotted a small classified ad in the local paper for an HNC in electronics and telecommunications at a uniformed merchant navy college in the Lake District, 200 miles away, and he went to the open day instead. He still has the paperwork, because his parents brought it over from the UK and it was sitting on his desk the week this was recorded: the prospectus, the invitation, the test results and the offer letter, dated April 1991. He was sixteen. He came out with a qualification in marine electronics at precisely the moment the job it trained you for stopped existing, and took an office job that had nothing to do with any of it.

The reserves came later, in his late twenties, and the reason was a passage in Rich Dad Poor Dad about what the Marines had done for Robert Kiyosaki. He chose the Royal Naval Reserve over the RAF equivalent because the unit was at Tower Bridge and the airfield was on the wrong side of London. Five years, never deployed, and he's careful to say so. What he took out of it was a set of habits rather than a career. There were the practical leadership tasks that always open with somebody asking whether anyone has done this before, and there was the officer who opened a cupboard he'd spent the morning cleaning, moved two cups aside and ran a finger along the back of it. The surface level is not the thing. Somewhere in the same years he collected PRINCE2® Practitioner and the ITIL Service Manager certificate, largely because his employer had a training budget and he'd worked out that unspent budget doesn't convert into anything.

The argument he lands on is why this is episode two rather than a bonus. He thinks project management is a way of seeing that most people don't have, and that you can test yourself for it without a syllabus. If your phone is on the 24-hour clock because ambiguity irritates you, if arranging a day out for somebody you barely know obviously involves printing the map and drawing the route on it, then you're already doing the work and the certification is paperwork catching up. He left corporate life in 2012 and never applied for a job again. Three companies on, he'll tell you the through-line isn't marketing or publishing. It's project over person, which is the thing service teaches whether or not anyone ever sends you anywhere.

Show notes and After Action Report: https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/002-stuart-bell/

All the links from this episode are on that page, plus a two-page After Action Report on the PRINCE2® path you can download: the task and the standard, what counts from your service, what to sustain, what to improve, and Stuart's own remarks on earning it.

Dr. Michael Shick took the ASVAB, scored high on the electrical section, and the Air Force told him he was going to be a tech controller. He asked what that was. This was the late '90s, and he'd been on the internet exactly once, in his high school library. In tech school his classmates talked about users and PCs, and he went to the back of the book to look up the acronyms, except the terms were too basic to be listed. He created his first email address that year. His first duty station had him tracing analog lines through walls to the telephone block in the morning and closing ports on a switch in the afternoon.

The project management was there the whole time, just with nobody's name on it. He was designing network architecture and writing requirements against other people's budgets before he'd heard the letters PMP®, which arrived as something lieutenants said in passing. When it became clear that a master's degree helped an officer get promoted, he applied one rule to the decision: if he only had to do this once, it had to be the thing that made him useful. He picked project management over the MBA, went to George Washington, and came out with a framework for what he'd been doing on instinct. The doctorate came later and came out of the work itself. He'd supported wounded warriors at installation level. By the time he was at NORAD and US Northern Command the ops mission ran in the day and the research ran in the evening: whether feeling supported by your organization changes the work outcomes of people carrying PTSD.

What makes this a good first episode isn't the career history, it's the argument underneath it. Mike left the military twice, once by separation and once by retirement, and both times what saved him was having started early. His line is that whether you do four years or forty, the ride comes to an end, and the only real question is whether you began planning before somebody else picked the date. He's deliberately agnostic about how you do it. CAPM® if you're junior enlisted, PMP® if you've got the three years and want the salary that comes attached, PRINCE2® if you're aiming at the British market, a scrum certification if you're heading for software. He now teaches at Western Carolina University, which ran arguably the first project management master's in the world and hosted the campus where the PMP® itself was developed. He'd rather you got the credential somewhere than got it from him.

Show notes and After Action Report: https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/001-michael-shick/

All the links from this episode are on that page, plus a two-page After Action Report on the MSPM path you can download: the task and the standard, what counts from your service, what to sustain, what to improve, and Michael's own remarks on earning it.