Lexis Czumak-Abreu graduated from college with a pre-med degree but decided it wasn’t a good fit for her.
Instead of taking up another job in healthcare or a science-related field, Czumak-Abreu became a full-time electrician, she told Business Insider last month.
Since 2022, she has amassed 2.2 million followers on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, who watch her lug heavy gear and fix masses of wires — all part of the day-to-day of her electrician job.
The big money doesn’t come from her employer: She makes $200,000 a year from her social media pages, including from brand deals with companies, she told the Wall Street Journal. The average electrician makes about $70,000 a year in New York state, and the average social media influencer makes about $58,000, according to ZipRecruiter data.
Despite the money she makes on social media, she decided not to cut her hours working as an employee for an electrical servicing company. Czumak-Abreu wants her company to know she’s a reliable employee, she told the Journal. And working fewer hours would give her less material to post about, since a bulk of her feed follows her life as an electrician.
She said that she films and edits all her videos herself, and spends her lunch breaks and nights editing footage.
“There are definitely weeks when I crash and get completely overloaded,” she told the Journal.
“Unlike in an office job where you go to the same building daily, I work somewhere different every day. I experience different things and see different people every day,” Czumak-Abreu previously told BI.
The interest in trade work comes as more Generation Z Americans weigh the pros and cons of a four-year college degree.
The cost of attending university is outpacing the rate of inflation, leaving young people to take student loans that weigh on them far after graduation. And degrees, even in top fields, are no longer a silver bullet to lucrative starter jobs. Only one in four Americans think it’s very important to have a college degree for a high-paying job, per a Pew Research survey of 5,000 US adults released last month.
The time and monetary costs of a conventional degree are compelling young people to ditch diplomas for tool belts. The National Student Clearinghouse reported that enrollment in vocational-focused community colleges rose about 16% last year — its highest level since the educational nonprofit began tracking the data in 2018.
Elaina Farnsworth, cofounder of SkillFusion, a credentialing program for electric vehicle technicians, told BI last month that she noticed a significant increase in Gen Z workers applying for her program.
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