Welcome to episode 126 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 2 of the interview with Tom Hollingsworth, discussing his transition to event lead at Tech Field Day, how the role was still technical in many ways though different, and a little more detail about what those who attend Tech Field Day experience.
Original Recording Date: 06-01-2021
Tom Hollingsworth has been the Tech Field Day event lead for about 8 years as part of his role at Gestalt IT after serving as a Network Engineer for many years. Catch part 1 of our interview with him in Episode 125 to further learn about how he fell into the Networking specialty
Topics – Moving to Tech Field Day, A Different Kind of Technical, The Mission of Tech Field Day
2:48 – Moving to Tech Field Day

* Tom spent years studying for the CCIE. He failed it 6 times and passed on the 7 attempts. Around attempt 4 he started documenting things.

* Tom came across some great blogs by Ethan Banks (a previous guest) about the CCIE.
* Tom then created his own blog to parallel what others were doing. As he started being more active in writing and on social media, he was contacted by Stephen Foskett about participating in Tech Field Day.

* This involved flying to California and learn about tech companies.
* Tom kept being invited back to these events.
* Around this same time, Tom was at an inflection point in his career and felt like he either needed to breakthrough and do something more or walk away.
* Foskett offered Tom a job, referring to it as The Dread Pirate Roberts. Tom would be completely nontechnical in what he did.
* Foskett basically hired a CCIE to buy airline tickets for people and edit video, and Tom agreed he wanted to do it. That was June 1, 2013 (Tom’s first day at Tech Field Day).
* Tom spent the first 1.5 years doing a lot of administrative tasks related to the events.
* At one point Stephen and Tom split the workload down the middle, with Tom running point on Networking and Wireless events and Stephen taking care of the rest.

* The growth pattern here was getting involved in the community, recognizing what the community needed, getting recognized for that work, and then coming on board at Tech Field Day and growing into it.

* There are some in the greater community who feel certain tasks are beneath them.
* When Tom started he was the 3rd employee of the company. There was no area for him to oversee. He was one of the people doing the work, and it did not matter what it was.
* "Don’t be the person that says no because something is beneath you because nothing should be beneath you." – Tom Hollingsworth

* Listen to Tom’s experience as manager of operations in a food service environment and how he used to give his employees breaks,