CONTENT CREATION HOLDS APPEAL FOR LAID-OFF WORKERS SEEKING FLEXIBILITY

With a compact mirror in one hand and an eyelash curler in the other, Grace Xu told her roughly 300,000 TikTok followers she was likely about to be laid off.

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She was right, she tells them in a subsequent clip. But she was planning to pursue a different career anyway: as a content creator.

“I guess the decision has been made on my behalf,” she tells viewers in the video posted earlier this year. “The universe has spoken.”

By all accounts, the U.S. job market is holding strong, with employers adding 303,000 workers to their payrolls in March. The jobless rate has now remained below 4% for 26 straight months, the longest such streak since the 1960s.

But that’s of little comfort to the thousands of people who have nonetheless found themselves out of work. Hiring has largely been concentrated to a few industries, while tech and finance have only added a small number of jobs in the last 12 months.

Rather than trying to return to traditional employment, however, people like 26-year-old Xu are carving a new path for themselves through online content creation, where they can make money from brand deals and advertising by producing social media videos ranging from educational to entertaining.

“I think most employees look at employers now and no longer think that they are going to find security — permanent security — in a job,” said Sarah Damaske, who studies labor and employment relations, and sociology at Penn State. “I think it makes it less risky to do something like go and be a content creator because employment with a traditional employer is so much riskier.”