Our Blog

BY Joel Junker

Preparation and the January 2013 Career Conference

The Cameron-Brooks team and the January 2013 Career Conference JMO candidates will arrive in Austin, TX tomorrow to kick off our first Career Conference of 2013.  In our recent travels to various bases and posts, my colleagues Joel Junker, Chuck Alvarez, and I have seen how diligently the candidates have been working and preparing to make a successful transition to Corporate America. 

Their hard work and efforts were really put into perspective for me during a conversation I had yesterday with an upcoming April 2013 Career Conference candidate.  She’s doing great in her preparation as well and told me how she had recommended a couple of books on our reading list to a colleague at work who had chosen to work with a different recruiting firm.  His comment back to her was “that is why I’m working with a different firm because they don’t make me read.”  This is a good example of why Cameron-Brooks is not right the right recruiting firm for everyone.  We do expect our candidates to work hard in our program and not because it is important to us, but because it should be important to them.  Our client companies are coming to us with positions reserved for the top performing JMOs in the military and they expect that they will be well prepared.  Thorough preparation, which includes not just professional reading but self-analysis, interview preparation, etc. helps a JMO mitigate the risks of making a significant career and life decision and helps ensure they are making a well thought out decision.  Additionally, it also demonstrates to a hiring company that while you may not have practical business experience, you are being proactive and dedicated in your desire to come to business and makes them feel more comfortable taking a risk on someone who in most cases has no actual business experience.   To be successful in anything in life requires top-notch preparation and making the transition from the military to business is certainly no exception.

In addition to discussing preparation in this blog post, I also wanted to break down some of the sample industries, companies, and positions for which they are recruiting. Sample industries for the January conference include: Medical Device, Consulting, Construction and Building Products, Industrial, Oil & Gas Exploration, Consumer Products, Logistics, Healthcare, and more. Sample companies include: Cargill, Carrier Corporation, Cintas, Ernst & Young, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson (multiple divisions), Koch Industries, Linde Group, Noble Energy, Oldcastle, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Shell, Unilever, and many more. 

Sample positions include: Field Clinical Specialist, Project Manager, Reliability Engineer, Applications Engineer, Regional Finance Manager, Market Development Manager, Business Strategist, Senior Consultant, Manufacturing Development Engineer, Information Technology Leader, Senior Manufacturing Supervisor, Transport Manager, Business Development Project Manager, Production Manager, and many more.  Although we are still in the process of finalizing the interview schedules, we expect the average number of interviews to be ~12, which is in-line with the previous Career Conferences in 2012.   Continue to follow the blog. Next week, I will write a post on the results from the January Career Conference.

Rob Davis