When Jonathan Sterling picks up a blowtorch these days, it’s not a metaphor. The 46-year-old former real-estate executive spends his mornings crawling through an industrial warehouse and cutting copper pipe in an HVAC training lab not far from his home in Vero Beach, Florida. “I never used a torch before,” he said. “You’re crawling around with live wires, high voltage, risk everywhere. It’s dangerous.”
Until last year, Sterling oversaw operations for 35 Keller Williams offices and 7,000 agents, helping generate roughly $13 billion in annual sales. When corporate layoffs hit in mid-2024, he joined the growing ranks of white-collar professionals wondering what — if anything — felt safe anymore.
“AI scares the hell out of me,” he told Quartz. Much of the work he once did, determining web strategy and overseeing website builds, was all too easily outsourced to AI bots. He’d watched longtime friends experience layoffs, too. “They were made redundant by companies slashing and burning the lower-level jobs that have been replaced with AI, which then means they don’t have a need for the people who were managing them — my friends,” he said.
So, instead of chasing another marketing or management role, Sterling enrolled in a hands-on, eight-week HVAC course costing $2,700. He plans to work in the field long enough to be “legitimate in the eyes of others in the industry,” then move into a leadership post at a company that’s expanding. Nights and weekends, he’s building Foxtown Education, a fledgling site listing trade schools and certification programs for other mid-career professionals like him.
