Veterans in Project Management You served. Now you're translating what you already did into a civilian project management career, and nobody handed you the map. This show sits down with veterans who made the jump: the certs that mattered, the ones that didn't, and how to turn what you led in uniform into what hiring managers understand. Every branch represented. https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/ en-us © Veterans in Project Management 082ea220-054f-5250-a250-c7d305778aed Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT episodic Transition stories and field notes for veterans moving into project management. Stuart Bell & Michael Shick You served. Now you're translating what you already did into a civilian project management career, and nobody handed you the map. This show sits down with veterans who made the jump: the certs that mattered, the ones that didn't, and how to turn what you led in uniform into what hiring managers understand. Every branch represented. Stuart Bell & Michael Shick podcast@veteransinprojectmanagement.com false https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/assets/img/cover-art.png Veterans in Project Management https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/ Marine Logistics Officer to Risk Manager with Russ Parker https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/003-russ-parker/ https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/003-russ-parker/ Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT podcast@veteransinprojectmanagement.com (Stuart Bell & Michael Shick) Russ Parker joined the Young Marines at ten and the Marine Corps reserves at seventeen, on a deal with his father that the college degree came first. Twenty years later he was a logistics officer headed for the lieutenant colonel board when surgery sent him to a medical board instead. The certification came the long way around. He'd helped his wife study for her PMP® years earlier and recognized every concept in her flashcards under a different name. What he found waiting in the syllabus was risk, which is the part of the job the Marine Corps had been paying him for since a lieutenant colonel asked how he could be trusted to plan a deployment when he couldn't plan a range. He now runs a risk practice and argues that most organizations accept risk passively, then write the check when it lands. Marine Logistics Officer to Risk Manager with Russ Parker 3 Stuart Bell & Michael Shick He saved a bank $1.1 billion and they gave him a hoodie. The message that meant more came from a stranger who'd passed the PMI-RMP. Russ Parker joined the Young Marines at ten and the Marine Corps reserves at seventeen, on a deal with his father that the college degree came first. Twenty years later he was a logistics officer headed for the lieutenant colonel board when surgery sent him to a medical board instead. The certification came the long way around. He'd helped his wife study for her PMP® years earlier and recognized every concept in her flashcards under a different name. What he found waiting in the syllabus was risk, which is the part of the job the Marine Corps had been paying him for since a lieutenant colonel asked how he could be trusted to plan a deployment when he couldn't plan a range. He now runs a risk practice and argues that most organizations accept risk passively, then write the check when it lands. 4253 false fullRuss 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.

]]> Naval Reservist to Book Publisher with Stuart Bell https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/002-stuart-bell/ https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/002-stuart-bell/ Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT podcast@veteransinprojectmanagement.com (Stuart Bell & Michael Shick) Stuart Bell spent five years in the Royal Naval Reserve and never deployed. He left high school with three passing grades when the officer candidate route needed five, trained as a radio officer at a uniformed merchant navy college at sixteen, then drifted into financial services IT without much of a plan. His is the awkward half of this show's premise. The service was part-time, the deployment never came, and the career after it was entirely civilian, so what carried over wasn't anything you'd put on a resume. It was a habit. He thinks project management is a way of seeing that you either have or you don't, long before it's a certification, and that most people don't have it. If you do, you're sitting on an advantage you probably haven't priced. Naval Reservist to Book Publisher with Stuart Bell 2 Stuart Bell & Michael Shick He failed most of his exams at sixteen and joined the Royal Naval Reserve in his late twenties because of a paragraph in Rich Dad Poor Dad. The habit he took out of it built three companies. Stuart Bell spent five years in the Royal Naval Reserve and never deployed. He left high school with three passing grades when the officer candidate route needed five, trained as a radio officer at a uniformed merchant navy college at sixteen, then drifted into financial services IT without much of a plan. His is the awkward half of this show's premise. The service was part-time, the deployment never came, and the career after it was entirely civilian, so what carried over wasn't anything you'd put on a resume. It was a habit. He thinks project management is a way of seeing that you either have or you don't, long before it's a certification, and that most people don't have it. If you do, you're sitting on an advantage you probably haven't priced. 4357 false fullStuart 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.

]]> Tech Controller to Flyer to Professor of Project Management with Dr. Michael J. Shick https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/001-michael-shick/ https://veteransinprojectmanagement.com/podcasts/vipm/001-michael-shick/ Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT podcast@veteransinprojectmanagement.com (Stuart Bell & Michael Shick) Dr. Michael Shick joined the Air Force in the late '90s as a tech controller, a career field that doesn't exist anymore, and created his first email address in tech school. He spent 21 years running projects nobody called projects. He picked up the language for it at George Washington and kept going until he had a doctorate. He retired out of the Pentagon leading the Invisible Wounds initiative and started at Western Carolina University a few weeks later, teaching project management at the place where the PMP® was developed. His story is also the case for this show. Whether you serve four years or forty, the ride ends, and it's better to have started planning before someone else picks the date. Tech Controller to Flyer to Professor of Project Management with Dr. Michael J. Shick 1 Stuart Bell & Michael Shick He'd been on the internet once, in a high school library, when the Air Force made him a tech controller. Twenty-one years later he retired into the university where the PMP was invented. Dr. Michael Shick joined the Air Force in the late '90s as a tech controller, a career field that doesn't exist anymore, and created his first email address in tech school. He spent 21 years running projects nobody called projects. He picked up the language for it at George Washington and kept going until he had a doctorate. He retired out of the Pentagon leading the Invisible Wounds initiative and started at Western Carolina University a few weeks later, teaching project management at the place where the PMP® was developed. His story is also the case for this show. Whether you serve four years or forty, the ride ends, and it's better to have started planning before someone else picks the date. 3790 false fullDr. 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.

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