“There’s a path that you have in your head that you’ve built up for however long, and anything different from that maybe doesn’t feel good enough,” Schelling told Fortune. 

“But my advice would be to recognize that within yourself, put it aside and just start somewhere.”

Schelling would know: The Verizon chief has an impressive resume, having previously led people teams at Estee Lauder, Prudential, and American Express. But before breaking into the corporate world, she worked part-time with children with special needs.

“Even I’ve had experiences with jobs I never knew I would be in,” Schelling added, but ultimately each job she did added up and led her to where she is today; In charge of the hiring and career growth for over 100,000 staff at the Fortune 500 (#31) firm. 

“Although I may or may not have stayed that long in that space, it’s all a build.”

Retail, hospitality and manufacturing jobs could be a launch pad to corporate management, the Verizon chief says

Young grads are already questioning whether their expensive college degree was “pointless.” They’re likely to feel even more grieved that experts are now advising them to turn their backs on the subjects of the studies, after shelling out thousands in student loans and wasting years in a classroom, when they could have nabbed a retail job straight out of school. 

But Schelling rejects the idea that working in a shop is settling. When we spoke, she had just come back from touring Verizon’s stores—and what she saw there undercuts the stereotype of retail as a dead end. 

“There were amazing retail professionals whose aspiration is to be a retail professional. There were also people that I met who went to school for more corporate jobs,” she said, adding that the majority had data science degrees or technology degrees. Some told her they didn’t like the culture in their post-grad office jobs. Others said they’re able to get promoted faster in retail.

“Whether they have a long-term career in retail or not, their initial thought in starting their career was not retail, yet where they landed is exactly where they should be,” Schelling insisted. “They were happy, learning and growing and really building a resume that could go in lots of different directions.”

After all, she says, it’s up to you where you then take the skills you learned on the shop floor. Just because that’s where you start your career, it’s not where it needs to end. 

“The transferable skills that come from a hospitality job or a retail job or a manufacturing job are so transferable when it comes to working in teams, when it comes to conflict resolution, relationship management, understanding and assessing the customer needs, understanding customer experience, you get management practice,” Schelling said. “So there’s just so much of that that is important for any job that you are building, even if it doesn’t feel like the path that you thought you would start building on.”

“And hiring managers, by the way, love that build.” As a hiring manager herself, she insisted that instead of being looking down on, retail and hospitality jobs are a big “plus” in her eyes.

“Even when I think about general managers, or our most senior executives, from a development perspective, I love nothing more than for them to be rounded out by going into those places or having a resume that reflects some of that,” Schelling added. “I actually think that helps differentiate you and stand out. And I don’t know if people know that when they’re just starting in the in the workforce—I certainly didn’t know that.

Schelling’s not wrong. The CEO of the world’s biggest recruiter says Gen Z grads need to consider hospitality jobs too

Plus, any experience right now, is better than none.

Last year in the U.K. alone, more than 1.2 million applications were submitted for fewer than 17,000 graduate roles. And unfortunately, even the CEO of the world’s biggest talent company, Randstad, doesn’t see Gen Z’s “hiring nightmare” improving. 

Under Sander van ’t Noordende helm, the staffing company places around half a million workers in jobs every week—and like Schelling, he recently warned that young grads may have more luck landing bartending, barista, or building jobs, than the cushy office jobs they have set their hearts on.

“We all grew up, with our parents saying, ‘go do something in college or university and then do something in an office,’ that path that used to work for a long time is starting to break,” he said

“People need to reflect on—taking a student loan, going to college and being trained or educated for a profession that is rapidly changing—whether that’s still the right path.”

Are you a graduate who’s resorted to working in retail or hospitality instead of your desired field? Fortune wants to hear from you: orianna.royle@fortune.com

Roy started Wubble with his co-founder, Shaad Sufi, in 2024, from a small office in Singapore’s central business district. Since then, his platform has generated tunes for global giants like Microsoft, HP, L’Oreal and NBCUniversal. They’re even used on the Taipei Metro, where AI-generated tunes soothe harried commuters. 

Generative AI has been a controversial subject in the creative industry: Artists, musicians and other content creators worry that companies will train AI on copyrighted materials, then ultimately automate away the need for human creators at all.

Roy, however, thinks Wubble is a way to fix a music sector that’s already broken. Artists are awarded micro-payments on streaming sites like Spotify, which only works for the most famous artists. 

Roy spent almost two decades at Disney, where he oversaw operations at its networks and studios in major cities like Tokyo, Mumbai and Los Angeles. He said his time leading Disney’s music group opened his eyes to the tedious process of music licensing.

“So many licensing deals were not going through because of the quantum of paperwork, the amount of red tape, and how expensive, complex and convoluted the entire process was,” he says. Yet, the incumbent music firms “don’t have a lot of motivation to streamline processes.”

Wubble is trying something different, collaborating directly with musicians and paying them for the raw material used to train Wubble’s AI. “If we’re looking at Latino hip hop, we’ll go to a recording studio in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, and tell them we need ten hours of Latino music,” Roy says. Wubble then negotiates a deal and offers a one-time payment for their work, at rates Roy argues are more competitive than other companies offering music streaming services.

He admits that a one-time payment isn’t a perfect solution, however, and adds that he’s currently exploring how technologies like blockchain can uncover new ways to compensate musicians for their help training Wubble’s AI models.

David Gunkel, who teaches communication studies at Northern Illinois University in Chicago, thinks training AI from artist-commissioned material is a smarter business move than just trawling the web for copyrighted content.

Production companies like Disney, Universal and Warner Bros., for example, are suing AI companies like Midjourney and Minimax of copyright infringement, arguing that users can easily generate images and videos of protected characters like Star Wars’s Darth Vader. 

“If you’re curating your data sets, and compensating and giving credit to the artists that are being utilized to train your model, you won’t find yourself in a lawsuit,” he explains. “It’s a better business practice, just in terms of your long-term viability as a commercial actor.”

Text-to-speech generation

Wubble currently offers just instrumental music and audio effects, but Roy thinks voice is the next step. By end-January, Roy says his platform will offer AI-generated voiceovers created from written scripts, to cater to clients who require narrative-led audio tracks. “So, the entire audio content workflow for a business can be housed on Wubble,” he concludes proudly. 

AI music startups are popping up around the world, hoping to use the powerful new technology to make the process of creating tunes and songs easier. Some, like Suno, cater in generating full songs, while others like Moises offer tools for artists.

In Asia, too, Korean AI startup Supertone offers voice synthesis and cloning, using samples to generate new vocal tracks. The startup, founded by Kyogu Lee, was acquired by HYBE, the entertainment company behind K-pop sensation BTS, and now operates as its subsidiary. Supertone even debuted a fully virtual K-pop girl group, SYNDI8, in 2024. 

At Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore last year, Lee said he saw musical artists as “co-creators,” not just in terms of licensing their voices, but also asking for their help in refining the technology. 

AI “will democratize the creative process, so every creator or artist can experiment with this new technology to explore and experiment with new ideas,” he told the audience.

Roy, from Wubble, also sees AI as a way to make it easier for more people to get involved in music creation.

“Music creation has always been a privilege. It’s been the domain of those who have the time and resources to learn an instrument,” he says. “We believe that every human being should be able to create—and AI enables that now.”