Tyler Sellhorn: Local Teacher to Global Leader, Navigating Career Transition | Work 20XX #10

Tyler Sellhorn runs remote for Polygon Labs, a blockchain development platform with 500 employees distributed all around the world. Less than 4 years ago, he was teaching high school algebra for the Fort Wayne Community school district, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the 140th largest metro area in the US, not necessarily known for its bustling blockchain sector.

Welcome to Work20XX, a show focused on the transitioning world of work, where we bring you the best minds in the business to provide insight, direction, and specific actions that leaders, line managers, and individual contributors can use as we experiment our way forward.

I started the process with Tyler with every intention to deep dive into remote team management best practices, leveraging Tyler’s day job, and Podcast where he’s hosted the biggest names in the workplace. And yet, I find his career pivot to be even more compelling, and something more broadly applicable to an audience far larger than those focused on remote work, including those laid off in the past, and those still to come.

How do people, transition to industries, that didn’t even exist when they finished our formal school? Thousands of people are getting laid off, automation will remove many jobs, many of which are crap, but still.

The good news is there are so many avenues to find a match for your current aptitude, applied to a new field, with some learning of the vocabulary, norms, community, discussions, hot button issues, voices, etc. And this is accessible online. Whether that be getting a certification for in demand cloud or data skills, or becoming a remote work expert as Tyler did, the resources are available, the information is available, and the community is available, you just have to pick which community fits your objectives.

Tyler transitioned from High School Teacher to Customer Success for a software company, then Remote and Ops for a blockchain development platform, picking up hosting the ‘We Work Remotely” podcast along the way.

As Meg Bear likes to say, the secret to re-skilling is doing. What Tyler shows is all, is that the resources are there, listen to the experts, read the posts, and take the certification. The open-source ethos, layered on vast libraries of information, has changed the way we continue to learn, both for fun, professional development, and the more frequent than comfortable career pivot.

My conversation with Tyler Sellhorn

 

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