Dan Miller is a 19-year-old business student in London.

He’s also the CEO of a social media company that aims to reach five million young Brits by 2022.

Called Young Professionals UK, it is currently available at over 400 schools and universities in the UK.

“Our mission is to be the next LinkedIn, but for students. They don’t want to be on LinkedIn – it doesn’t speak their language,” he says.

The company, founded on an entrepreneurial scholarship two years ago, made £45,000 ($63,000) last year, plus a £50,000 investment. Miller employs 10 people across three offices in the UK, and works with companies like Barclays, KPMG, Rolls-Royce and L’Oreal that want to recruit users of his networking app.

He’s an example of the youngest generation of innovators that will define how we work in years to come.

The post-millennial workforce

It’s hard to give a definitive age range for Generation Z, as descriptions vary among experts. But roughly, the oldest members of this group are around 22, which means some are starting to leave school, to apply for jobs and make money.

These members of Gen Z (also called “iGen”) are already replacing millennials as the youngest members of the workforce. The oldest millennials are in their mid-30s – some run large companies or are in middle management and their effects on working life are already being felt.

It will soon be Gen Z’s views and habits that shape and change how we work. But how?

‘Screen animals’

This generation grew up with social media, watching people like Justin Bieber go from YouTube obscurity to global fame. The importance of social media – both in how it’s shaped Gen Z and how Gen Z will use it to reshape the workforce – can’t be overstated.

“This is a generation that has actively had entrepreneurial opportunities growing up – in many ways, if you’ve grown up managing your personal brand on Instagram, you’re much better wired to think of yourself as an individual brand instead of a cog in an organisational machine,” says Arun Sundararajan, a business professor at New York University.

Miller echoes this sentiment: “I think social media is a big influence – everything strikes us as, ‘we can start our own company,’” he says.

It’s not hard to see where he’s coming from: on YouTube alone, young people have launched their own business of reviewing makeup, creating slime (and writing a follow-up book about it), unboxing new trainers or getting strangers to watch them play video games.