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BY Joel Junker

For Academy Grads – SACC vs. Cameron-Brooks Career Conference

I wanted to piggy back off a great blog post my colleague, Pete Van Epps, posted last week discussing the accuracy of a Cameron-Brooks Career Conference.  If you haven’t had a chance to read it, follow this link.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several discussions with Service Academy JMOs regarding their transition options and several have brought up SACC, or Service Academy Career Conference.  On the surface, SACC sounds great as its geared towards someone with an Academy background and its called a “career conference”, just like Cameron-Brooks.  But if you’ll permit me to pull back the curtain for a second, I wanted to illustrate a couple of key points of distinction.

1.  Not all “Career Conferences” are equal.  A picture speaks a thousand words:

This is a photo of a past SACC Conference and probably what you might expect from a job fair.

At a Cameron-Brooks Career Conference, you won’t find a single booth, round of meet & greets, a bunch of HR reps, etc. As my colleague Pete pointed out in his post, our Conferences are so much more targeted.  The vast majority of client company representatives at a Cameron-Brooks Career Conference are the actual hiring managers who attend with open positions for development candidates that they are looking to fill NOW.   In 2018, our candidates have averaged ~12+ interviews apiece that we have vetted and strategically mapped on their behalf.   Our client companies prioritize this event as a key part of their recruiting strategy. Because of this, it takes, on average, 18 working days for our candidates to receive an offer (or multiple offers) after our Career Conference.

This is a Cameron-Brooks Career Conference:

2.   A SACC Conference is not just for JMOs.  Being an Academy grad myself, I am often emailed information about SACC and I recently received an email inviting me to the SACC Conference in San Diego.  Below is an excerpt from that email:

The email reads “Did you know…..SACC is NOT a JMO-specific Job Fair?”  As someone who graduated from West Point in 1993, separated in 2001, and has been working in Corporate America for 17+ years, my demographic represents 1/3 of the attendees at a SACC conference?!  So, yes, SACC is for Academy graduates, but don’t confuse that with meaning ONLY currently active-duty Academy JMOs.  Cameron-Brooks is a JMO specific recruiting firm that offers mentorship, development and a broad career search specifically targeted to someone with a JMO background. Our expertise is leveraged to your advantage, and our client companies come ready to HIRE their next generation of leaders.