Career-Confidence Blog

By Jerry Jones

I came to Career-Confidence the way a lot of people do, quietly, and a little reluctantly. I signed up in 2019, employed at the time, but worried that the government contract I was supporting would end within six months. Instead, it ended up lasting more than three years. During that time, working with Career-Confidence, I learned that the job-search landscape had changed since I was last involved, and that what I thought I knew about resumes, LinkedIn, and networking was already out of date. I kept using the resources here and there, slowly rebuilding my understanding of an environment I was no longer used to.

Then, in September 2022, that contract finally did end, and I lost my role. Once I was actually searching, I saw how central LinkedIn had become to the whole process, and I leaned hard on Career-Confidence to learn it properly while the government contractor kept me on its internal bench. By December, the contractor connected me to a Navy fuel conservation initiative aimed at reducing consumption for a fleet that burns nearly 3 million gallons a day. Imagine paying for that at the pump. I stayed on that work through March 2023, continuing to build my LinkedIn skills along the way.
As that work was winding down, I was recruited for a Service Delivery Manager role inside the government contractor where I had already spent most of my career, and one of the best companies I have ever worked for. It is a genuinely people-focused organization, and that mattered as I weighed my options. That role absorbed nearly everything I had for the next year and a half. It was not that Career-Confidence stopped being valuable. I simply did not have the bandwidth to engage while I was buried in turning that program around.

When that role ended, I came back to Career-Confidence, and this time the search was genuinely complicated. My career has been a series of pivots: government contracting, semiconductor manufacturing, operations, and back to government contracting again for nearly two decades. My job loss happened before the DOGE-driven federal cuts hit, but I could feel the ground shifting and knew the market would only get harder. That left me with a real question: stay in GovCon, ideally back with a company like the agency mentioned above if I did not relocate, or pivot back to manufacturing or operations, where I had built my early career. My father was aging in Texas, and GovCon work there is much more limited in opportunities, but manufacturing and operations were genuinely pulling at me, especially with one of the largest manufacturers of heavy equipment having just relocated its headquarters from Illinois to Texas. It was a strange and clarifying position to be in. I was hearing other job seekers think through their own direction, while wrestling with that exact kind of decision myself.

Robert Brandau and Career-Confidence had not changed. What changed was how much time I had to actually engage. Once I was unemployed, I saw the depth of Robert’s focus and dedication to the people he supports. Many programs I have belonged to are genuinely caring, but they serve a much larger group without enough volunteers for real one-on-one attention, so the help becomes broader by necessity. Robert’s approach is different by design: small groups, built around actually knowing the individual in front of him. That distinction matters more than people expect until they have experienced it.

The other thing that sets Career-Confidence apart is the caliber of insight behind it. The professionals involved are actual HR practitioners and recruiters, people who have sat on the other side of the table and know what really moves a hiring decision. Their advice is grounded in real hiring experience, not generic tips recycled from a blog post.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I wanted to give something back. I find real joy in helping other people solve hard problems. It has been the thread running through my entire career, whether I was fixing a supplier’s manufacturing defect, untangling a troubled federal program, or building a quality system from scratch. I kept growing my LinkedIn knowledge until I was able to start co-leading sessions with Robert, and eventually took the weekly session entirely off his plate, becoming the primary instructor myself. It felt like a small payback for everything I had gained there. There was no real separation between teaching and being taught.

Robert and the people behind Career-Confidence gave me both the tools and the support to keep going with my primary search focused on DC and PM GovCon. Because of them, I am not navigating this alone, and I am no longer relying on an outdated playbook. I actually have a lot more “career confidence” now than when I started, in more ways than one.