I earlier wrote about how Paramount employees at the bottom rungs experienced the months leading up to the Paramount-Skydance merger.
At this point, the best advice for a young person looking for a job in entertainment right now is to have been born two decades earlier.
Discovery swallowed Warner Bros., then Skydance bought Paramount, then — coming soon — will itself possibly swallow Warner Bros. Discovery. Each deal means more consolidation, more redundancies, more layoffs. Add in the lingering wreckage of the strikes, runaway production and death of Peak TV spending, and you have the worst job market for early-career entertainment professionals anyone can remember.
Since time travel isn’t on the table, thousands are trying their best to survive the present moment. So what’s actually working?
To find out, I surveyed more than 50 early-career entertainment workers — all with less than a decade of experience and still trying to hang on. The results paint a clear picture:
- Sixteen percent had been laid off from an entertainment job in 2025.
- Almost 70 percent said they’d applied for more junior roles than they’re qualified for just to stay in the industry.
- They’re applying for hundreds of jobs (not a hundred, hundreds) and scoring interviews for barely 10.
In other words, this is no longer an industry you break in to. It’s one you struggle to stay in.
U.S. colleges hand out about 176,000 bachelor’s degrees a year in Hollywood-related fields, according to the National Center for Education Statistics: visual and performing arts and communications. California alone produces 22 percent of the nation’s fine arts graduates. They’re studying and scrapping to join a Hollywood that, in California, employs 25 percent fewer film and TV workers than it did at its post-pandemic peak — with L.A. County shooting days down 42 percent in 2024 compared with 2022, according to the Otis College Report on the Creative Economy.
The result is a brutal math problem for young workers: more graduates, fewer productions and an entry-level pipeline that’s quietly breaking down.
Is Anyone Hiring?
The first problem is the shrinking number of jobs. The Anonymous Production Assistant, a.k.a. TAPA — who started a blog in 2007 that has grown into a job-hunting resource for early-career film and TV workers — describes how dramatically the entry-level funnel has shrunk.
“When I started out, you used to just assume there would be three office PAs on every TV show and any decent-sized movie — and four or five on set,” says TAPA, who still works in entertainment. “Nowadays, sometimes you only have one office PA, and they have Uber Eats instead of sending someone out for food.”
Once upon a time, employers were messaging TAPA multiple times a day with jobs to post. Now it’s a few a week, if that.
The career ladder starts early and if you can’t get on then, it becomes even harder to climb up later. Amy Piero, 28, graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 2019 and began applying for roles in the music industry, hoping to create a path toward becoming a music supervisor. After Covid hit, many internships still required being in person — but she didn’t feel comfortable moving to a big city during a pandemic with her 6-month-old child. When infection rates subsided, Piero says the amount of opportunities to start her career were slim. “By then, I was too far out of college for internships,” she says.
But timing isn’t everything. Hollywood contraction also means fewer entry-level roles, which means fewer people move up, which means fewer mid-level vacancies, which means the whole assembly line just stalls. The career escalator jams at the bottom.
“It might be a thing that leads to the collapse of the industry simply because there’s nobody graduating from PA to coordinator to UPM [unit production manager] to producer,” TAPA says.
Nationally, workers ages 20-24 are unemployed at 7.4 percent, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data — double the 3.7 percent for workers 25 and older. The outlook is even bleaker for young people in L.A. and New York City, where the entertainment industry is concentrated. The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds is around 12 percent.
Where Do You Look?
Nearly everyone surveyed uses LinkedIn. Entertainment-specific job boards like entertainmentcareers.net and showbizjobs.com are popular, as are individual company career pages. But the most coveted resource has long been the UTA job list — an invite-only email compiled by the talent agency and distributed to a vetted private network, which has featured roles throughout the entertainment industry that never appear anywhere else.
Even then, landing a job can mean hundreds of applications, months of silence and moving back home.
Don’t stop here
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