Courtesy of Whalar Group
Max Klymenko boasts more than 16 million followers and last year was named the TikTok Awards UK & Ireland’s creator of the year. In his most popular series, the “Career Ladder,” he stands on a ladder across from a guest and attempts to guess their current job in under two minutes — or the first job of high-profile guests, from the new UK prime minister to Will Smith and Gordon Ramsay.
As a former intellectual property lawyer and corporate consultant, it’s not lost on Klymenko that for many young people, his job as a creator is the dream career. In an interview on the ladder this summer, Klymenko talked openly about challenges in his own industry, like the inequality in the creator economy. We also discussed his own job path, the strategy behind his 130-country world tour, and why he’s all-in on streaming.
Klymenko’s own career journey is intertwined with his content.
“It took me like five years to try a job of being a lawyer, and like five hours to realize that I don't want to do it,” Klymenko said of his own career path. The “Career Ladder” show, for which he is now best known, was inspired in part by his own struggles to find a job and a desire to inspire viewers with job ideas they may never have heard of and to help them learn more about what those jobs actually look like.
His early content was also tied to his personal career journey: He started a podcast as an excuse to interview an employee at a company that had rejected him four times. He asked that initial podcast guest for a job, and eventually was hired by the company, only to later leave to pursue content full time.
He worried the concept of standing on the actual ladder, which he said was inspired by seeing two construction workers, was “too cringe,” so the original ladder he purchased for the series sat untouched for two months.
With a show focused on careers and jobs, he said he is trying to battle both his own and his audience’s cynicism, particularly among young male viewers, by inspiring people to consider paths they may have never heard of before. “I’m Ukrainian, so I get it. Things are bad, okay? They’re bad. That being said, however, there’s a lot of things to look forward to,” he said.
Around the world, people share their fears of AI’s impact on careers.
After visiting 11 countries on his 130-country tour, Klymenko announced Tuesday he is recovering from knee reconstruction surgery and pausing his planned two-year journey. According to his manager the tour will resume early 2027, with some events and activations planned later this year.
Growing up in a small country, the artists he wanted to see would never visit his country of Ukraine. He wants to interact with and thank the global fans of the show. And the reach is strategic, he said: “It’s our business strategy to globalize the channel.”
The world tour, which he estimated would take him through New Year’s Eve 2028 prior to the surgery, has enabled him to have a new variety of guests, such as a girl who runs an ice cream shop with her family in Costa Rica and a nine year old with a candy business and ambitions of being a billion-dollar company.
The tour has also revealed commonalities in viewers’ concerns around their careers, like a pressure among young people to found their own businesses or be entrepreneurs instead of pursuing more traditional fields.
Klymenko said he hears concerns about AI from participants around the world during his ongoing tour, citing the example of people who say they aspire to be careers like lawyers or engineers but are worried AI will be more skilled than even their best efforts.
Personally, he’s excited about AI and how creators can work with it, but thinks “big companies and governments overestimate how excited young people” are about it. “It’s not even that they think ‘Oh it’s gonna take my job’ or ‘Oh I’ll be able to get a job,’ but it’s more like it’s just not exciting.”
He thinks people overly glamorize the idea of being a professional creator.
Klymenko, who got a master’s degree in Inequalities at the London School of Economics, said the creator economy has some of the “most insane inequality” of income. He believes people underestimate how difficult it is to become a top creator, how much luck is involved, and how difficult it is to stay at the top.
“We really need to have a conversation about realistic expectations around this career, that you are probably not going to make that much money. You're probably not going to be world famous. And the expectation that people have to just go into it and suddenly become super famous or super rich, that's not how it works,” he said.
“It’s tempting to become a professional creator. But I think it’s one of the happiest scenarios you can have in your life where you have a job, or you have a business, or you do something, you make content about it and you distribute your personality and your professional self across these pillars,” he said. “I think being a professional creator as a career is very specific, and if you are capable of making it to the very, very top of let's say YouTube, you probably can make more money doing something else.”
He thinks “too many content creators think about business,” noting the people in creators’ ears urging them to pursue different projects. His primary income comes from brand partners on the channel — typically large companies wanting to showcase their different jobs — and speaking engagements. He now works with an eight-person team, five of whom travel with him on the ground at all times.
“We could also sell ladders,” he joked. He recently started streaming, which he believes is the best strategy for any aspiring creators now because it’s on the rise and completely different from past eras of content.
This story is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by Washington Post Creator, a team outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about Washington Post Creator.
