Gen Z’s title as the “first digital natives” is holding true as more and more of its members graduate college and enter the workforce.
22-year-old Mareena Emran is an example of how members of Gen Z are using their digital backgrounds to their advantage in both the job search as well as in the workplace. Emran has gone so far as turning her passion for social media into a career as a curator, working for companies like Instagram and more recently, Amazon. While Emran grew up using social media casually like many people around her age, the beginning of her college career led her to think about all the ways she could leverage this in her education and job search.
While studying journalism at Arizona State University, Emran took several classes that allowed her to delve deeper into social media as a tool for mass communication. In her first year of college, Emran began to seek out internships, which is when she started experimenting with social media to help her stand out among other candidates.
“I was proving that social media can be used for professional things by running my own experiments. So I would post my own things and then I pull metrics,” Emran said. Through these experiments, she was able to pull together concrete experience, which she used in her job search. “So I think that kind of showed [employers] a perspective of Gen Z, that we’re tech minded,” Emran said.
After securing her first internship with a local public relations agency, Emran found social media to be a significant part of her job. According to Emran, it was around this time that she started to notice a shift—social media gradually started playing a more important role in marketing and communications, even becoming a job position on its own. As a member of Gen Z and social media native, Emran took on a lot of this responsibility in her internship.
“Even though this was three, four years ago people weren’t taking social media as seriously, as professionally as maybe they do now and this was maybe like, when Tik Tok and you know, all this stuff was still kind of used for recreational use. But along my studies and along my internships, I realized that I could maybe use short form video in a more professional sense,”
Like for the majority of her generation, the COVID-19 pandemic again completely transformed Emran’s relationship with social media. More than ever, Emran—along with the rest of the world—relied on social media to stay connected and in touch with her loved ones. At the same time, Emran was anxious to not let the pandemic hold her back from developing skills she would need in her career.
Around this time, Emran began working with Buzzfeed News as a part of their “Gen Z Ambassador” program. This was Emran’s first exposure to TikTok, where she began posting her own content and almost immediately began finding success as a content creator.
In the almost four years since Emran began utilizing social media as a tool to help her career, she has personally noticed a significant shift in her industry to favoring social media.
“I was really passionate about social media and actually proving to professional spaces that you can use short form video, and you can be successful with it. And now look, the world is so fascinated with short form. So I’m really glad that we’ve come this far in four years,” Emran said.
Marisol Ortega 