About two years ago I started to wonder how one joins the blockchain world, without prior experience. After doing a week of extensive searches on careers, skills and jobs needed in blockchain, all I could find were a few reddit posts with obvious “You better be a software developer” rhetoric. I am not a programmer by trade, and that sparked my curiosity about what it takes to transition to blockchain for a career without being a developer. Until recently, all I got were dead ends, old blog posts with very generic “try harder” suggestions and nothing with a hands on approach. It seemed anyone in the field was too busy with building cool decentralized projects and didn’t have time to share it with the rest of us. Two years later, there seems to be even less blockchain career advice yet right now it is looking to be one of the hottest fields to enter right now, according to Linkedin and their 2020 study.
“As companies explore how to take advantage of this technology, they have a huge need to build this skillset.” – Linkedin
Blockchain skills were voted the #1 top skill employers are looking for in 2020 by Linkedin. It was the top priority for employers hiring in the U.S., U.K, France, Germany and Australia, over in demand fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing and UX Design
Even in the current crisis it seems that many blockchain companies are actively hiring.
Coinbase also recently announced its specular 40x growth and advertised over 100 positions across its United States offices and in both Europe, and Asia.
The hiring trend in crypto seems to expand beyond just Coinbase, Kraken and Binance.
“A month after the new coronavirus was first reported, in December 2019, blockchain jobs were submitted to job site Indeed.com at a rate of 114.5 per million. By February 2020 that number had increased 3% to 118.4 per million.” – Bitcoin KE
Recently I got an update that BlockchainDriven, an award winning blockchain implementation company in the blockchain world decided to launch an educational arm focused on giving a real look into the industry and how to get your career started in the space.
That got my attention, since how can it be possible that there is no information on the blockchain field and how to enter it, while Linkedin says that blockchain space is #1 priority for companies to hire in.
BlockchainDriven has been around since 2015 and has been involved and implemented in some fantastic projects across logistics, healthcare, finance, cyber security and government tech. And what they have done with the academy is to open their doors to offer an insider look into these projects.
They just did a free live streaming session last week, Future Proof Your Career on Blockchain and you can watch a recording of it at the link. I found it to be very insightful and relevant to what I was looking for. Instead of trying to overcomplicate the blockchain space, as I have seen companies do many times, the BlockDrivenAcademy session was focused on giving the listener a pure and clutter free look into possibilities in blockchain, what skills sets they need, how current blockchain space looks, what blockchain skills you need to get hired and with hands-on case studies on existing blockchain projects to give clear view of what takes place on blockchain. Postgraduate courses in the blockchain career is a great start and let the people in the blockchain industry get you up to speed.
Author: PAUL LENNIE
Paul is a Scottish finance expert who moved to New York in 2002 to trade on Wall Street, and has been a blockchain and cryptocurrency advocate since 2013. He is a well-respected member of the global blockchain community, and has worked with banks and other large corporations on integrating blockchain technology into their businesses.
