She's a 27-year-old electrician — and she makes $200,000 a year off social-media posts about her job
- Lexis Czumak-Abreu is a full-time electrician who highlights her work on social media.
- She has about 2.2 million social-media followers and makes $200,000 a year from her content.
Lexis Czumak-Abreu graduated from college with a premed degree but decided it wasn't a good fit for her.
Instead of taking 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's amassed about 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 duties of her job as an electrician.
The big money doesn't come from her employer: Czumak-Abreu 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, Czumak-Abreu decided not to cut her hours working for an electrical-servicing company, telling the Journal she wants her employer to know she's a reliable employee. And working fewer hours would give her less material to post about since the 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 Gen 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 out student loans that could weigh on them far after graduation. And a college degree, even in top fields, no longer guarantees a path to a lucrative starter job. Only one in four Americans think it's very important to have a college degree for a high-paying job, a Pew Research survey of 5,000 US adults released last month found.
Because of the time and money it takes to get a conventional degree, more young people are ditching 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, a 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.