Facing AI and a tough job market, gen Z turns to entrepreneurship: ‘I have to prove myself’

When Ashley Terrell graduated from the University of Hawaii in 2024, she planned to find a job in marketing, maybe for a tech company. She had a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a college résumé that included a student marketing job for Red Bull. But after months of applying, her only offer was to work in the power tools section at Home Depot. “It was quite a shock,” she told the Guardian. “I searched for jobs every single day in that Home Depot bathroom.”

Terrell’s generation is entering the workforce in a particularly unlucky moment. Hiring in the United States has slumped to its lowest rate since 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While workers of all ages are feeling the pressure of an uncertain economy, it’s gen Z who is the most pessimistic about their job prospects: entry-level jobs are the most vulnerable to impacts from artificial intelligence, and some younger workers are seeing their careers stall before they have even started. Terrell felt she was not just competing with other people for jobs. “Especially with marketing, a lot of people think it can be replaced with AI,” she said.

The unemployment rate for Americans between 22 and 27 is now at its highest level since the pandemic. “The job market is really sluggish right now,” said Daniel Zhao, the chief economist at Glassdoor, a workplace review company. “Entry-level workers are finding it difficult right now to get their foot on the ladder at all.”

For many young would-be workers, that has translated into taking jobs they never imagined after earning a four-year degree: retail work, dog walking or other part-time jobs without benefits. Some have remained unemployed months or years after graduating.

Others are taking a different approach: when no jobs exist, they’re creating their own.

Terrell, who started a YouTube channel as a student, decided to build a marketing portfolio by making videos for brands. She started by direct messaging companies she liked and offering to make them content – sometimes for free. Eventually, Jamba Juice bought a video she had made to use as an Instagram and TikTok ad. Two years later, armed with a portfolio of videos like it, Terrell parlayed her experience into a part-time marketing role for a local distillery. Along the way, she built a roster of clients she continues to works with on branded content.

“No one was offering me anything like what I wanted to do,” said Terrell. “So I just tried to see what I could do on my own.”

The Guardian interviewed more than a dozen young workers who feel, like Terrell, that the rules for finding a job changed just as they were entering the workforce. As the number of entry-level job postings have gone down in recent years, the expectations for early-career workers have gone up. For a generation that wants more purpose, more flexibility and more alignment with their work, the recent job market has felt disenchanting.

This is unfolding against the backdrop of the AI boom – something they see as a threat, a boon or maybe both. The same tech that threatens to cut into entry-level positions is also making it easier for some of these workers to start their own businesses, by compensating for skills they don’t yet have, offering tools and platforms they can put to use, and allowing them to do more things at once.

“All of the sudden, you’ve got to have some way to get up to the fourth rung of the career ladder,” said Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School and the co-director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard. One way to ascend the rungs? Make your own ladder.

‘I was kind of forced into it’

Suhit Agarwal graduated from the University of Southern California in 2025, hoping to use his degree in computational and applied mathematics to secure a job at Google. But after applying more than six times for both internships and jobs, he never even got an interview. Applications to other big tech companies were also dead ends, so Agarwal pivoted. At 24, his résumé includes job titles such as “founding engineer” for companies he helped start. In those roles, he said he used AI tools including Claude Code to take on bigger responsibilities than he would have been able to on his own.

It’s not the path he expected to be on – or the one his parents hoped for – but “charting my own course has been working so far”, he told the Guardian. One of the startups he helped found was acquired, netting him a small equity payout. Recently, that work experience helped him to land a job at a fin-tech startup.

Shola West, who is 25, has a similar story. She worked at media agencies in her early 20s and never planned to create her own business. But in 2024, shortly after starting a new job, her entire team was laid off. As she navigated an unpromising job market, she came to believe that working for herself was the most viable path. Now, she runs her own brand consultancy in London and works as a content creator on TikTok.

“I was kind of forced into it, given how the market was,” she said. Since she started her consultancy, she’s partnered with high-profile brands such as Paramount and Sony Music. “The transition was definitely hard, but I had that motivation of, well, my career basically flopped,” she said. “Now I have to prove to myself and everyone else that I can survive.”

The reasons for the poor job market are complex, involving an uncertain political climate, an unstable global economy, and emerging technological disruptions – specifically AI, and the anticipation that it will upend not only how employees do their work, but the need for some positions entirely.

“This is particularly true for recent college graduates because many of the types of jobs that are entry-level involve substantial amounts of routine cognitive work,” said Harvard’s Fuller. In a 2025 LinkedIn survey, 63% of executives reported that AI would replace at least some of the work of entry-level employees at their companies.

As a result, “the expectations of entry-level workers have completely changed,” said Ethan Choi, a partner at the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. As recently as two years ago, Choi worked with a fairly big team of associates, who were earlier in their careers and learning the ropes. Today? “I

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