CareerTok Is the New Career Center: Why Gen Zs Trust TikTok Influencers Over Teachers

by Kalin Anastasov

July 28th, 2025

Originally Published on Influencer Marketing Hub

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Key takeaways

• A Schultz Family Foundation/HarrisX study found seven in ten young adults find career and education opportunities on social platforms; four in ten actively seek that content.
• Only 16% of parents encourage social media for career exploration—highlighting a generational guidance gap.
• Cybersecurity creator Nav Karmacharya fields hundreds of daily questions, showing how niche experts fill mentorship vacuums traditional systems leave.
• Macro creators like Sam DeMase address widespread anxiety about pivots, competition, and AI, while urging job seekers to identify their “superpowers.”
• Employers and schools must respond with honest, scalable mentorship and content—or watch creators permanently own the guidance role.

Seven in ten young adults now scout jobs and education paths on social platforms, sidelining campus counselors and job boards.

Nav Karmacharya didn’t set out to replace a guidance office. The 23‑year‑old cybersecurity analyst started posting “day in my life” clips, quick explainers on governance, risk and compliance, and blunt advice about breaking into non‑technical cybersecurity roles.

Four months later, he’d attracted around 14,000 followers, mostly students and early‑career professionals who now flood his DMs and TikTok Lives with hundreds of questions a day.

“I feel like a job coach and mentor most days,” he told Fortune. The most common query?

“What certs should I get to break into cybersecurity?”

His answer typically steers people away from credential obsession and toward hands‑on experience, soft skills, and networking—gaps he sees traditional channels failing to fill.

Karmacharya is one face of a much broader shift captured by a new study from the Schultz Family Foundation and research firm HarrisX: seven in ten young adults aged 16–24 say they find educational and career opportunities on social media. Four in ten actively seek career content; another 30% stumble on it passively while scrolling.

By contrast, fewer than one in five parents in the same study encouraged their kids to use social platforms for career exploration. The dissonance is telling. While adults cling to counselors, job boards, and LinkedIn, Gen Z is rebuilding the career center on TikTok.

Why a Cybersecurity Analyst Becomes a Mentor

Karmacharya’s niche—cybersecurity governance and compliance—exposes the heart of #CareerTok’s appeal. It’s not just about generic resume tips; it’s access to insiders in specialized fields that schools rarely demystify.

“A lot of students don’t have strong mentorship from professors or peers, so they turn to creators online who are already doing the kind of work they want to do,” he said. His two‑hour live stream on July 9 drew more than 600 comments—effectively a rolling office hour, open to anyone with Wi‑Fi.

Dritan Nesho, CEO of HarrisX, framed it bluntly: young adults are substituting “day‑in‑the‑life content on social media for job shadowing and hard‑to‑find real-life exposure.” Internships are scarce; shadowing requires connections many don’t have. A creator with a phone can close that gap in ten minutes of vertical video.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation, went further: “Social media has really turned into the new career coach for young adults.” Not because Gen Z is addicted to apps (though they are), he argued, but because “traditional resources” are “misaligned” and “outdated.”

CareerTok’s Emotional Underpinning: Fear, Pivots, and AI Anxiety

Career influencer Sam DeMase—ZipRecruiter’s in‑house career expert with roughly 900,000 combined followers across TikTokand Instagram—says her audience is dominated by questions rooted in stress: how to pivot careers, stand out in a market where postings vanish after 48 hours, set boundaries in a first job, negotiate offers in a shaky economy.

For Gen Z, she adds, there’s a specific layer: “Is my entry-level job going to be replaced by AI?” The anxiety is palpable, but so is the desire for agency. DeMase starts by helping people articulate their “superpowers”—the three things they’re really good at—because without that, she says, it’s “really difficult to build a powerful resume, interview narrative, and value proposition.”

That concept translates back into leadership, too. DeMase advises managers to identify and celebrate their team’s strengths, even using tools like CliftonStrengths and dedicating recurring one‑on‑one time to professional development.

In other words, the behavior Gen Z seeks from creators—individualized guidance, clear roadmaps, accountability—they also expect from employers.

Instagram and TikTok, Not LinkedIn

The study behind these insights found Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are the dominant daily platforms for career exploration among the 40% who actively seek it. LinkedIn, despite its professional veneer, ranks near the bottom for daily use in this subgroup. That isn’t a contradiction; it’s a comment on usability and relatability. LinkedIn feels like a polished lobby. TikTok feels like the back office where the real talk happens.

For creators like Karmacharya, TikTok’s format is the point. Short clips make niche concepts digestible; live streams let him triage dozens of questions in real time. The parasocial dynamic—intimacy without proximity—creates a mentorship loop at scale. One cyber analyst can guide hundreds of aspiring peers, and those peers can validate and amplify each other in the comments.

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