A framework built from fifty years of listening
and a lifetime of non-linear choices.

Tyler Blackwell's career is itself a living argument for the Factors of Career Choice framework. It is not linear. It does not follow a single industry or a single discipline. It follows a person who has spent two decades trying to understand how human systems work and what makes people thrive inside them.

He began at the U.S. State Department as a Presidential Management Fellow, working on Israeli-Palestinian affairs under Ambassador David Hale with a Top Secret/SCI clearance. At Sewanee, he wrote his undergraduate thesis on Patrice Lumumba. At the University of Chicago, where he earned an MA in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies and an Executive Program in Leadership degree from Booth, his graduate work turned to Abd al-Qadir Al-Jazai'ri. He also holds a certification in behavioral science from MIT and a change management certification from Prosci.

From diplomacy he moved to education, leading executive functions at Chicago Public Schools. From there to management consulting at Kincentric and EY, focused on organizational design and capability development. He is currently Director of Global Workforce Planning at Morningstar, building a strategic, data-driven, and human-centered workforce planning capability across Morningstar and PitchBook.

Alongside that work, Tyler is building Wit, an enterprise workforce intelligence platform, and Layers Not Linear, a Substack newsletter at the intersection of behavioral science, labor economics, geopolitics, and career design.

The Factors of Career Choice framework began in 2016 and 2017 as a tool Tyler used in coaching conversations. Over nearly a decade of refinement, shaped by hundreds of real career conversations and deepened by ongoing collaboration with his father, it became the most coherent and research-grounded framework he knows for how people actually make the choices that define their working lives.

Dr. Richard Blackwell has spent more than fifty years sitting with people in some of the most difficult moments of their lives. A psychologist, a life coach, a former hospital chaplain, a therapist, and a teacher, he is also Tyler's father and the intellectual foundation on which much of this framework rests.

His life has been as non-linear as the framework he helped build. He grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where as a boy he met John F. Kennedy during a campaign visit. As a young man he stood on the National Mall and heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech. He protested the Vietnam War. At a retreat in New England in the 1970s he found himself in conversation with some of the most consequential psychologists of the twentieth century, including members of Carl Jung's circle.

He earned a bachelor's in business from UNC-Chapel Hill, an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in psychology from UNC-Chapel Hill. He has been a pastor, a hospital chaplain, a cancer family therapist in Charlotte, a psychologist in private practice, faculty at UC-Irvine, UNC-Charlotte, and several other institutions, and in recent years a life coach.

He is a voracious reader, a brilliant synthesizer of ideas across disciplines, and a natural storyteller who can take fifty years of clinical observation and make it feel like a conversation over coffee. The three-family framework — family of origin, family of choice, and family of work — is his contribution to the Factors of Career Choice. So is the core conviction that career planning and life planning are the same thing.