Helicopter Mechanic to PMP-Certified Action Officer
Chapters
Brian Demer
Marine Corps CH-53 mechanic turned management consultant. Twelve years in banking, then project delivery at Booz Allen Hamilton — now a PMP-certified action officer who mentors others through the transition.
Marine CorpsShow highlights
- Military hands-on experience doesn't translate to civilian credentials automatically — Brian learned that at a factory gate with no A&P license.
- You're probably already doing project management. Brian ran acquisitions and IT rollouts for years before he had a word for it.
- "Never again will I not have a certification" — the mindset shift that turned a detour into a deliberate path.
- The skills that survive a career pivot are the human ones: stakeholder buy-in, communication, making a tool make sense to the person who has to use it.
- A non-linear path isn't a broken one. Sales to banking to consulting to PMP looks fragmented until you see the through-line.
Brian Demer's transition is the one this show exists to tell. He left the Marine Corps in 2002 with five years as a CH-53 mechanic and a straightforward plan: drive to the Sikorsky factory in West Palm Beach and put his skills to work. He got as far as the gate.
What the military hadn't told him was that hands-on experience isn't a civilian credential. No A&P license, no interview. So he pivoted into what he knew he could do — talk to people — and spent the next dozen years in sales and banking, quietly running acquisitions, IT rollouts, and change programs without ever calling it project management.
It took a mentor pointing him toward consulting, and eventually a PMP, for the language to catch up to the work. His advice for anyone standing where he stood at that gate: the experience counts, but you have to translate it into terms the civilian world screens for — and a certification is the fastest way to make that translation legible.
Transcript
AI-assisted transcript, lightly edited. May contain errors.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Veterans in Project Management podcast. Stuart Bell here, joined, as always, by Dr. Michael Shick. Mike, how's it going, buddy?
Great, Stuart. Nice to see you. Well, I'm particularly excited about this guest. Now, granted, I'm excited about all guests, but I've known Brian now for about six years. Mr. Brian Demer, he spent five years in the Marine Corps as a helicopter mechanic and then got the designation as a flying maintenance bubba, if you will. So with that, Brian eventually found himself into project management. You may have that question of, well, how did you find yourself from a helicopter maintenance slash flight engineer into project management? That has to be a story and a half.
Yeah, it certainly is. I'm sure there'll be a lot more questions as I kind of go through my intro, but I just wanted to say thank you guys both for having me.
I've known Rabbi for quite a bit of time now, and he was telling me about this podcast, and of course, in my normal fashion, as he knows, I was all, well, maybe. But very quickly it turned into excitement because I just thought about the opportunity of, one, my journey and how I got to where I am today, and if that can help just one service member, that would be awesome.
It's funny because in my new role now, I do a lot of mentoring, specifically on helping folks in the government get prepared to transition the other way. And so I might have done it opposite, or maybe I've done it in a bunch of different ways, but at the end of the day, I'm very thrilled to be here.
My project management journey really started on the flight line. As Rabbi said, I'm a Marine from 97 to 2002. I served as a CH-53 helicopter mechanic. If you don't know, it's the biggest helicopter in the U.S. arsenal. And it always has a stream of smoke coming out of it, which is a good thing. It's made to leak — at least that's what I was told when I was a young mechanic.
Brian, I'm sorry to jump in there. So a 53 is bigger than a Chinook?
Yes. It holds up to 55 passengers with the center crew seats. A lot of people don't think so because the Chinook has the double rotors on top. But our rotor blades are 172 feet long. There's seven of them. It's a big boy.
And so I think like many veterans out there, I transitioned out of the Marine Corps with these big dreams. My dream at the time was I wanted to use my military wrench-turning skills and go right to the Sikorsky plant. Sikorsky is the manufacturer of the helicopter that I worked on, the CH-53. So I had this huge dream and moved out to West Palm Beach where there was a factory.
And I'll tell you, I was immediately hit with a double dose of reality. The first reality was I got up to the gate wearing my suit, ready to go with my resume in hand. And the security guard said, I'm sorry, but we're in the middle of a downsizing. Turn around and get out of here.
And I was like — I didn't know what to do. So I just did a U-turn and started heading home. And I was on the way home just thinking, wow, did that really just happen? Did I have everything in that bucket?
So Brian, were you just showing up, cold calling almost, resume in hand? I'm just going to go to the HR office and give them my resume?
I had this idea in my head that because I won a Sikorsky Aircraft Maintenance Award and I was a QA and one of the best mechanics on the West Coast, I was like, oh, they know me.
In your mind, the security guard should have said, Mr. Demer, we've been expecting you.
Right. I'll be your boss one day, maybe. But yeah, so that did not work, clearly.
The first thing I did when I got back home is I got online, made some phone calls and tried to connect with an actual person in HR. And when I did, they immediately said, yes, that's correct, we are in the middle of a downsizing. We're not looking at applicants. But if we were, what would you be interested in?
I was like, oh, I've been fixing helicopters for the last five years. And they're like, great — so do you have your civilian A&P license?
I'm like, what's that?
And that was the other brutal impact that hit me really quickly. Oh man, I don't have the right or any civilian certifications. Despite having five years of military hands-on experience. It was certainly a catalyst for me that basically made me do — I don't want to say a 180, but I had to come up with something, and I had to come up with something quick.
So as that hangar door was temporarily closing, I pivoted into something that I knew I could do really well, and that is talk to people. So I naturally went into sales. I started working for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, went through their management program, and then eventually transitioned into financial services where I spent about 12 years in the banking industry.
And it was during that time in banking that I noticed something. While I was executing my normal day-to-day sales activities, I had this organic knack for stepping up and running projects. At that time, I didn't know what that meant or what that was going to do for me, but I just knew that I loved the structure. I loved the problem-solving. I loved the delivery of the final product or solution.
At that time I had a good mentor who was like, hey, you might be really good in consulting. And not that I didn't want to stay in banking, but once you got to a certain point in banking — I wanted to be a senior executive there, and the only way that was going to happen is if someone retired or died.
So I decided to start looking at some consulting firms. And that eventually led me to Booz Allen Hamilton, where I was brought in as an associate.
Something to look forward to.
Yeah. The thing in the back of my head was, never again will I not have a certification. Never again will I not be prepared. I took the challenge head on.
So what's awesome is I didn't just pass. I scored 3xAT — above target in every category. I even beat my supervisor, which yes, I did have to rub in.
That's always a good feeling.
In this case, I did.
Yeah, thanks for that, Brian. So help us clarify. You got out in 2002, then Enterprise, moved into banking. And so you moved into consulting about 15 years after you got out, approximately? And you were doing projects all the way up to this point, but it became more formalized when you got into the consulting realm. Is that an accurate statement? Or at least more formalized in your understanding of it?
My understanding of it, right. When I talked about my interview, I talked about leading a major bank acquisition — and not just being a member of it, but being a leader of it, making sure we hit certain sprints and milestones as we continued to turn the switch on to say, hey, you're not this bank anymore, you're going to be this bank.
Things like that, or even new IT platforms for sales. There were elements of going out and getting stakeholder feedback and support and dealing with all the resistors who didn't want to do things on the iPad. They're like, oh my God, this takes the humanity out of it. It's like, no, it's a tool.
So I just had a natural ability to really make things make sense for the end user, the actual sales associate. It could be something as simple as us changing our commission structure. For whatever reason, they're like, hey, Brian, you want to lead that project? I'm like, yeah, if it means I could maybe add a couple of percentage points to commission, why not?
But during that whole time, I had no idea what that stuff was. I truly knew what would make this successful and what would be the reverse. I'm like, no one wants to be surprised with this stuff. So I know I've got to have a talk strategy. I called it a talk strategy — you know, a strategic communication plan. Oh, well, I don't need to call it that. I just call it talk strategy.
So I didn't know any of the nomenclature, but I certainly knew all the activities.
As we've been recording these, people have shared that same experience. I realized I was doing this thing that we now call project management. I just didn't have the language for it. We called it something different, but it was obvious what we should be doing.
That's the common thread with us as practitioners. It makes logical, obvious sense. It's kind of like, why aren't these idiots doing it this way? This is the way we should do it, even if we don't have the language.
I guess I could draw that line, but it'd be fragmented. There'd be twists and turns. It's certainly not a straight trajectory.