• Forget an MBA or climbing the corporate ladder. The Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of tomorrow could be Gen Z dropouts. That’s because new research shows they’re most likely to be working on their own side hustles outside of their 9-to-5 jobs.  

It’s no secret that Gen Z grads are feeling the burn after spending a small fortune on their degree, only to realize the qualification is pretty “useless” and won’t even increase their chances of getting employed anymore. They’re about to feel even more vengeful.

That’s because new research highlights they could one day wind up reporting into a Gen Z dropout. 

A staggering 58% of the generation have a side hustle outside of their everyday job—with young men around 8% more likely to be moonlighting as their own boss after work and on weekends. But the most likely person to be running their own business after hours? Gen Zers without a degree. 

In fact, the research from Resume Genius reveals that the likelihood of having a side hustle decreases as Gen Z workers’ level of formal education increases. 7 in 10 Gen Z workers with some college experience (suggesting that they dropped out before completing their course) are currently running their own gig on the side. In comparison, this drops to just around 55% for those with a bachelor’s degree or master’s.

It comes as the youngest generation of workers increasingly opts to ditch the corporate ladder and favour of running their own business. The second-fastest-growing job title among Gen Z right now is “founder,” according to LinkedIn. Another study echoes that half of the 18 to 35-year-olds who’ve started a side gig or plan to start one say their primary motivation is to be their own boss.

And while not every Gen Zer with a side hustle become the next tech titan on the Fortune 500, they’re still one step closer than those without one. 

Billion-dollar side hustles from Apple to Airbnb

Some of the world’s biggest companies started as scrappy side hustles built in basements, garages, or during lunch breaks.

Take Apple: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs met in 1971 while working at the tech giant HP. Within a year they had their first side-hustle, selling “blue boxes” that enabled people to make long-distance phone calls at no cost. They then worked on the computer Apple 1, often meeting up to brainstorm in the garage of Jobs’ Los Altos childhood home while still working other full-time tech jobs.

Jack Dorsey was working as a web designer at a podcast company called Odeo when he started designing Twitter.

Instagram was just a side project, spun off from a more complicated app called “Burbn” that ex-Google employee Kevin Systrom came up with while working at start-up travel recommendation website Nextstop. 

Under Armour, Etsy, and Airbnb were all once side gigs, too. But you don’t just look at the world’s most famous billionaires for examples of side hustles turned into full time gigs. 

Chase Gallagher was 12 years old when he started mowing his neighbors’ lawns in Pennsylvania for $35 a pop in the summer of 2013. By 16, Gallagher had already turned over $50,000 from his lawn mowing side hustle. Today, it’s evolved into a landscaping business that employs 10 people and does “everything from stormwater management and drainage work to pavers and lighting,” the now 23-year-old told Fortune. Last year, CMG Landscaping generated more than $1.5 million in revenue.

Likewise, Ed Fuller told Fortune how he turned his side hustle for Amex into a $27 million-a-year marketing agency that works with MrBeast. And House of CB—the cult fashion brand with over 6 million social media followers and a Kardashian fanbase—started out as a teenage side hustle on eBay.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Gen Z is ditching college for “more secure” trade jobs—but building inspectors, electricians and plumbers actually have the worst unemployment rate. Meanwhile, jobs in logging, hunting, fishing and refuse have high fatality rates. New research has revealed the safest jobs that the millions of unemployed non-grad Gen Z could apply for instead, with office admin roles coming out on top. 

Gen Z are ditching degrees in droves and landing trade jobs. They’re finding themselves in six-figure careers that tap into their desires for more travel and less time at a desk, without any student debt.

But not all that glitters is gold. Many of these jobs come with risks of their own. 

Take wind-turbine technicians, for example. It was the fastest-growing job in the U.S. last year and doesn’t require a degree. But the work is far from easy: Technicians face extreme weather, haul 50 pounds of gear, and climb tall ladders into tight spaces.

Despite the buzz, the safest non-degree role is still at a desk.

Research by Yijin Hardware analyzed jobs based on fatal injury rates, projected openings (2023 to 2033), median wages, and education requirements—and coming in at No. 1 is office admin and support roles.

These roles offer lower physical risk, consistent demand, and decent salaries—making them especially appealing for Gen Zers looking for stability without a degree.

According the research, the 5 safest jobs of 2025 that don’t require a degree are as follows:

1. Office and Admin Support
2. Production Workers
3. Installation and Repair
4. Construction and extraction
5. Transportation and Material Moving

‘Safe’ office jobs may be a ticking time bomb

Entry-level office jobs in admin and support may still be the safest bet for non-grad Gen Zers right now, but unfortunately for them, they could be starting to dry up. 

Even highly educated students are currently finding themselves “unemployable” as employers launch a “wait-and-watch strategy” in the midst of AI advancements and economic uncertainty. Graduates in the UK are facing the worst job market since 2018 as employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, warns Indeed. Companies like Intel, IBM and Google have been freezing thousands of would-be new roles that AI is expected to take over in the next 5 years.

And entry-level roles, like office admin ones, are among the first to be slashed.

At global investment firm Carlyle, previous entry-level hires who evaluated deals used to turn to Google for articles and request documents manually. Now, the work is being done by AI, and the firm is shifting toward hiring junior-level employees who can ensure the work is accurate.  

CEOs have also iterated their hiring strategy. Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, told The Wall Street Journal he decided not to hire a summer intern. 

Despite the headwinds, the research forecasts 19,000 new jobs in the sector over the next decade—far fewer than transportation’s 63,000 predicted new opportunities, but still more than in repair or construction (between 11,000 and 15,000).

‘Dangerous’ trade jobs

Trade jobs are having a moment. Touted as the smarter, safer alternative to “irrelevant” overpriced degrees and (at risk of being automated) entry-level white-collar jobs, around 78% of Americans say they’ve noticed a spike in young people turning to jobs like carpentry, electrical work and welding, according to a 2024 Harris Poll. They’re not wrong. Trade-school enrollment really has been surging post-pandemic, even outpacing university enrollment.

But the new research suggests the reality isn’t as stable—or as future-proof—as it’s being pitched.

Yijin Hardware found trade jobs are among the most “dangerous” out there for non-grads—logging, hunting, fishing and refuse have the highest on-the-job fatality rates, paired with unpredictable working conditions, and limited opportunities. Not a single entry-level office job made the bottom rankings of their list. 

It’s not the first study to suggest Gen Z may be looking at manual work through rose-tinted glasses. According to another new WalletHub study ranking the best and worst entry-level U.S. jobs in 2025, trade roles dominate the bottom of the list. Welders, automotive mechanics, boilermakers, and drafters all rank among the least promising career starters. 

According to the researchers, these roles scored poorly due to limited job availability and weak growth potential, as well as their potentially hazardous nature. 

“While trade work isn’t as easy to automate as some office jobs, new technologies like prefabrication and robotics are starting to take over parts of the workload, which can reduce demand,” WalletHub’s analyst Chip Lupo told Fortune. They’re also not immune to mass layoffs and at the mercy of interest rates and demand.

And worse still, more often than not, many trade jobs might not actually make Gen Z happier than a desk job. Another study ranked electricians as the least happy workers of all. According to the research, the physically demanding nature of the job and 40-plus hour workweeks weren’t made up for by the just “decent” salary. Perhaps surprisingly, not a single trade job made the list of happiest jobs.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• To land the historic job as the first Egyptian, Arab, and African woman to go to space, Sara Sabry trained and researched every morning before her full-time tech job and didn’t see daylight for years. The grind to space isn’t for the faint of heart—and it’s a reality check, she suggests, for work-life balance-loving Gen Z.  In an exclusive interview with Fortune, she shares the brutal routine that helped her defy a “0.0%” chance of becoming an astronaut.

Sara Sabry became the world’s first Egyptian astronaut after flying to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on Aug. 4, 2022—marking the first time an Arab or African women has ever gone to space, all before even turning 30.

It’s a common childhood dream, but one that few realize. For starters, you need access to a plane just to rack up the 1,000 flight hours required to apply to programs like NASA.

For Sabry, the mission was even more impossible. She wasn’t born into a country with a space agency. There were no astronauts who looked like her. And she didn’t have elite connections or deep pockets.

So to get her foot in the door, the then 28-year-old had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to squeeze in early-morning training and bioastronautics research, all before reporting to her full-time job as CTO of a Berlin-based tech startup by 9 a.m. 

Then after work, she’d work some more on her own start-up and space training—and it’s the kind of gruelling discipline she says young people today shouldn’t shy away from if they want to unlock their dreams.

“Back then it was, it was really, really, it was really tough,” she recalls in those early days of her career, speaking exclusively to Fortune during her stay in London for the 2025 American Express Leadership Academy. “You would wake up at night, and then you would go back at night, so you barely see the daylight ever.”

She says that she’d tackle the most important tasks of the day before 10 a.m., when others start to trickle online.

“I see a lot of young people now they’re wanting to take the easy route without working so hard. But the truth is, you have to make sacrifices. You have to put yourself through a lot of discomfort,” Sabry adds. “Of course, it’s not easy to wake up 4:30 a.m. every morning and be completely isolated from the world, right? But it goes to show that you can really transform your life—and you have so much control over your life.”

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Sabry says the experience radically shifted how she viewed limitations tied to class, geography, and identity.

She didn’t have the passport, the platform, or the privilege, but she pushed through anyway. And in doing so, proved what’s possible when ambition is backed by relentless effort.

“It changed the way I see things now. Having gone to space and having done the thing that was impossible, honestly the likelihood of that happening was around 0.0%, unless I changed my nationality.”

She beat the odds—and over 7,000 other applicants for that Blue Origin flight—to make history.

Now, she’s made it—but still pulling 13-hour days and has a jet-setter schedule

Despite finding success, you still won’t find Sabry kicking up her feet. 

On top of being an astronaut, the now 32-year-old is also the executive director of Deep Space Initiative—a nonprofit she founded to make space more accessible—co-founder of the Egyptian Space Agency’s Ambassador program, and is completing a PhD in aerospace engineering. She is also conducting research on the engineering of the next generation of planetary spacesuits at the NASA-funded Humanspaceflight lab.

If that wasn’t enough, Sabry is building new ventures and growing a speaking career that’s taking her around the world. And with such a packed, jet-setting schedule, she’s learned to adapt her rigid routine into something more flexible. But that doesn’t mean she lies in.

“I haven’t lived in a one place in three years,” she says. “I have to live out of my suitcase, so you have to adapt.”

Nowadays, Sabry starts her day at around 6 a.m. with a workout, before responding to emails and doing “admin stuff.” 

“It’s not 4:30 a.m. anymore, because I have to work late these days,” she explains, adding that the time difference for international calls she has to take while often based in Egypt pushes her work schedule back, bringing her total workday to 13 hours. 

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“My first meeting is at 9 a.m. and my last meeting is from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. so I can’t be waking up too early,” Sabry continues. Eight hours of sleep is non-negotiable—and so is having every task for the day blocked out in her calendar.

“Because I’m balancing a PhD, two companies, my public speaking, and more, I think it’s really about scheduling. As soon as tasks are scheduled in my calendar, I don’t have to think about them,” she adds.

“It’s so easy to get distracted when you’re working on other things, and you think, ‘Oh I have to work on my research or I have to answer emails.’ But no, emails are going to stay in the inbox until the scheduled time for me to be looking at emails. Sometimes, of course, you have to do urgent things. But the things that are not super urgent? You pre-schedule.” 

Eyes on the prize: The cure for exhaustion 

If you feel exhausted just reading about Sabry’s routine, let alone copying it, she says there’s only one way to survive it: become obsessed by your mission.

Sabry said she had no other choice because the alternative was not giving it all and risk not achieving her dream.

“It was always this fight,” she explains. “I was never going to be given an opportunity. Having grown up knowing that things are just not going to be given to me, I never expected anything. It makes you work so much harder. But I never really resented it, or felt like, ‘Oh, I’m doing too much,’ because that was just the necessary thing to do to move forward. There was no other option.” 

And she says having a packed schedule helped her move forward with her goals because she didn’t even have time to think about anything else. 

“Most of the day you’re in the dark, but you’re so consumed by it—having that focus and not having time to look at what’s going on in different places was really, really key,” she tells Fortune. 

“So being so consumed and having just a really packed schedule, and knowing that I was investing in myself. When you’re working on things that you know are towards your purpose, it just gives you so much peace.”

Ultimately, she’d only be kicking herself today if she knew there was an extra hour or two in the day that she hadn’t used to push herself forward.

“If I wasn’t doing everything that I can and I could do more, then I wouldn’t feel at peace. Then I would kind of go through like the other rabbit hole of, you know, being kind of like extra tough on yourself. So by doing so much, it gave me peace.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• From billionaire Bill Gates to former Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg, the world’s top performers all have one thing in common: They invest in their own potential, says Bill Hoogterp, the Fortune 500 career coach who’s worked with both. He recalls Gates blocking off an entire week to read in a cabin. “More and more leaders are doing the same thing,” he exclusively tells Fortune—and the sooner Gen Z copies them, the better for their careers.

Bill Hoogterp has spent decades advising celebrities, CEOs, and rising stars inside some of America’s most powerful boardrooms. Through his coaching firm, LifeHikes, he’s helped more than 700,000 professionals level up their communication and leadership skills and personally worked one-on-one with “thousands” of executives, many of whom appear on Fortune’s lists of the most powerful people in business.

And there’s one habit that Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and Hoogterp’s other top power-player clients share.

“I had this chat with Sheryl Sandberg, and we were joking around that we all need to be the CEO of our own potential,” Hoogterp tells Fortune.  

The problem? “Almost none of us seems to want the job. We’re constantly kind of deferring to what the world wants and just reacting to everybody else.”

But what the top 1% do well, Hoogterp says, is they invest in themselves—and it’s something he says everyone should be doing if they want to elevate their careers. Especially Gen Zers, who are early in their working lives and stand to gain the most by consistently backing their own growth.

“So think of it like this: You have a pot of money, a few thousand, and you’re starting your career. You could sit on it, put it under the mattress, and pick it up, 30 to 60 years later,” he explains. “Or you can invest it in the bank and get interest on it every year. Which one would you rather do?” 

Hoogterp says to imagine the return you’d expect from an investment—say 10%—and commit that percentage of your time to improving yourself each week.

“So if you are putting in 40 to 50 hours a week, that’s going to be about five hours,” Hoogterp explains. “Every week, you’re going to spend four or five hours on you. Now, whether that’s going to trainings, getting coaching, reading books, watching TED talks, it doesn’t matter. But take it seriously. 

“If you do that every week, your thousands of dollars are going to be worth tens of millions of dollars, whereas somebody else is going to wake up—they’re just as smart, they’re just as good people as us—but 20 years goes by, and they’re more or less in the same position, same mindsets, same place. 

“That interest compounded is based on you, investing in you.”

Books: Bill Gates’ way of investing in himself

If you don’t know where or how to start investing in yourself, Hoogterp suggests taking up reading. 

“The top leaders in the world spend an hour a day reading,” he says, adding that they often start their day in the early hours of the morning with a book in their hands. But it doesn’t have to be a daily chore.

“I spent a little time with Bill Gates, and he found that there were a lot of books and articles, things he wanted to read and just didn’t have time,” he adds. “We all have that stack on our nightstand of books that we want to read but haven’t had time.”

So what did the billionaire Microsoft cofounder do? “He took a whole week, blocked everything off, went to a cabin, and just read books. He said it was transformative to his life…In fact, Bill now does two weeks a year just reading.

“More and more leaders are doing the same thing,” Hoogterp adds. “So finding time to really, just really go off the grid, give yourself time to think, but with a purpose—get through that stack of books you’ve been meaning to get to, or TED talks or articles, or a little bit of both.

“And that is another way to think about how seriously the most successful people take their own learning and growth, whereas us less successful people, we’re just running through the motions. We’re trying to catch up.”

But I am not a reader, what can I do? 

Unfortunately for those who prefer to watch videos rather than pick up a book, Hoogterp says reading really is the key here. 

“You’ve got to give yourself a disparate diet for your mind,” he explains. “So you do want a mix of reading, whether it’s long form, books, or articles. Podcasts are great, but try to mix it up. 

“Reading is different because you retain almost 31% more when you read something than when you listen to it on audiobooks, because you’re actively processing versus passively processing.

“And get the pen out, like when you were back in school writing notes in the margin of the book because you think it might be on the test. Oh, this makes me think this,” Hoogterp adds. “Your brain remembers you writing the words, which means you’re actively processing much deeper, much faster, much more powerfully.”

Finally, if you still can’t get the mojo to park some time aside and read, Hoogterp suggests joining a book club. Not only will it hold you accountable, but it’ll force you to dig deeper, ask better questions, and walk away with ideas you can actually use. 

“You’re not just reading a book with other people, but you’re tackling it together,” he says. “What do you think about this chapter? Oh, that made me think this. I agreed with this. I didn’t agree with that.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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