Glam, Money, Contacts By VIPs, Invites to Speak and More: But, Being an Influencer Has Become Another Line of Work Blocked for Gen Zers

Of course, influencer is an actual career path. You bet, you can leave traditional employment behind. Along with that there could be so much more: glam, easy money, big names contacting you, invitations to speak at special events and the name recognition can open other opportunities.

But, as The Telegraph documents, the influencer space has already evolved into a mature industry. That means it's glutted. Brutally competitive. And unforgiving by those paying for your influencing if your numbers, tracked by the likes of Click Analytic and Lefty, go down. 

So, the 57% of Gen Zers who want to be influencers have yet another line of work blocked. The majority of those already in are struggling. Right now only 12% are grossing $50,000 or more. Worst of all, AI can wipe out 80% of influencer work.

As with a growing number of career paths that are collapsing and leaving Gen Zers out in the cold, it wasn't always that way. 

Back in 2005, being an influencer was totally open. Wild. Even I. the oldest of the Boomers, was able to get in. 

Actually, it was because I was "so old" that I managed to enter with a big edge: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and tabloids like Abovethelaw gave me coverage. It was a good story for them because it was so atypical that someone 60 years old would pick up on the potential of a new technology. That was the digital medium of blogging. 

The story was also juicy because I, as well as a number of other Boomers who became influencers, made it our business to learn blogging because our other businesses had collapsed. There were also other edges. We had a deep background in communications as well as expertise in a particular niche. Blogging is niche-oriented. 

It was all new. New brought the attention. Plenty of it. Sure, we had to get down the fundamentals of SEO (that is search engine optimization) to rank high on Google. But otherwise, we just plopped ourselves down with the laptop and let it rip. No, we didn't seek out advertisers. They came to us. Live-blogging events for businesses? That was a major source of revenue. Metrics to track clicks, likes, comments and more hadn't become sophisticated yet so we weren't in a numbers game.

However, even back then, the reality was: You're hot, then you're not. I lasted longer than the average five to seven years. 

Fortunately, my focus on the legal-sector niche during the Great Recession brought in requests for coaching. So, when influencing was over I could just shift into another lane. Unlike too many Gen Zers, I had the business skills to navigate that kind of career transition.

The current tragedy for Gen Zers, as The Telegraph hammers, is that they are chasing after Influencer work because they can't land that first traditional job. Therefore, they haven't yet developed business knowledge and skills. Even if they catch on as an influencer, at least for a while, they probably won't be able to extend that experience into a career path that's sustainable.

 It had taken me 10 years employed full-time in the Fortune 50 to be able to start my own business. When that business collapsed I could see the commercial opportunity in blogging. And when that petered out I could run with a career in coaching.

It's a downright public service to provide Gen Zers with work, any kind. Work get you more work. Yearning to be an influencer could be another dead end. 

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