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At a time when young adults are aimlessly looking for someone, anyone, to hire them, it seems there’s finally an industry that needs today’s Millennials and is willing to potentially employ them in abundance. It isn’t something you can study at college, nor is it a talent you’re born with, but if you have a knack for social media — and can formulate it into a marketing plan — jobs abound. In a recent BusinessWeek article (“Twitter Twitter, Little Star”), the founder of Mashable said “there are more positions than people right now. There are a lot of companies waking up to it and realizing that they need to have a social media strategy.”

Ypulse president Dan Coates recently called the rise of social media the “one bright spot on the youth employment” horizon after attending The Future Of Marketing at the ANA Digital & Social Media Conference. The funny thing this is, teens aren’t learning social media in school; rather, they’re learning social media despite school (with a few notable new media experiment exceptions). Gen Y has an inherent knowledge of how to market things online because they’ve been essentially marketing themselves online for years.

So what does a social media expert do, exactly? That’s what corporations are still trying to figure out. According to Businessweek:

First, they scramble to hire social media officers. Second, they figure out what it is, exactly, that social media officers do. Blending departments—promotion and marketing, customer service and support—and requiring the ability to be shameless boosters while maintaining a light, self-aware tone, the job category is experiencing a boomlet as companies try to keep up with the new media world. The chief social media officer may be supplanting the chief branding officer as the zaniest human resource innovation in memory.

However valuable savvy social networking may be, it takes more than a few thousand Facebook friends and an active Twitter account. The problem is, many young adults don’t have the formal marketing skills to back up their social media prowess and, on the flip side, experienced marketing professionals don’t have the social media know-how. Working together, new media experts and traditional marketing execs can create a truly dynamic digital plan for brands.

On a personal note, I studied traditional journalism in college and have since realized along with the rest of my generation that print media isn’t where the money is — digital is. I’m thanking my lucky stars that I was a bit of a computer geek growing up, because my experiences with blogs, Facebook, Twitter and HTML have made me far more hire-able than knowing what a nut graph is.

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Categorized under: Workplace

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