Kennie Bukky, co-founder of The Pivot Place.
Courtesy: Kennie Bukky
Kennie Bukky, a millennial professional, earned a six-figure salary in 2024, and she attributed her high earnings to two key strategies: building an audience on social media and learning high-paying skills.
Despite being under 30 years old, Bukky juggles multiple jobs and earned just over £100,000 (roughly $130,000) in 2024.
However, it was not always like that. When she graduated from university in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in forensic science, she felt her prospects were bleak.
“Straight out of university, I was pretty worried about money, looking at the wages, it just wasn’t that great,” she said in an interview with CNBC Make It.
But she knew she wanted a high salary – so she did.
“I’ve been very intentional about what career paths I take and how I trade my time for money,” she explained. “Money has always been a problem… [and] I realized that it was important to go for top careers so that I could mitigate that,” she explained.
Because of this attitude, Bukky turned to the financial services sector, where she saw that she could make money.
She trained as a Compliance Officer and worked in this role for companies including KPMG and Visa. Now, despite taking a break from her 9-5 for the past year, she has a six-figure position as a full-time content creator, as well as through her work as a digital youth engagement officer, career coach and public speaker.
Bukky chose to keep her legal name and age under wraps to protect privacy, and CNBC confirmed her earnings via invoice statements.
“I felt I had so much value to share”
Bukky said building a personal brand on social media is key to generating high income.
She has nearly 130,000 followers on TikTok and over 35,000 followers on Instagram and creates content around career advice and wealth building for her demographic of mostly young, ambitious women of color.
“I just wanted to share my knowledge about career and personal finance, because I felt like those were things that I picked up at a pretty young age and I’m really good at,” she said.
“I felt like I had so much value to share, and that indirectly translated into building a personal brand.”
As a result of her growing audience, she has been able to collaborate with brands such as LinkedIn, Deutsche Bank, MicrosoftACCA, Bing and HSBC on social networks.
Becoming a social media personality gave Bukky the impetus to co-found The Pivot Place in 2023, a company that helps people develop skills that will transfer to non-coding tech roles.
‘Skills pay the bills’
Bukky said she can charge higher prices for the services she offers because she has invested in training.
“I’m a firm believer that when you invest in yourself, skills and knowledge, it can have a super high ROI [return on investment] in terms of how much you can earn as a person, which is sometimes more than the stock market will ever pay you,” Bukky explained.
By the time she was 23, Bukky was working as an analyst at RBS on a salary of £28,000. She then moved up to a managerial position which paid £40,000.
“I was very intentional about knowing I wanted a big jump. I didn’t want to just be here and get a 3% raise every few years,” she explained. “What that involved was looking for a role that was much older than the one I was in, and learning how to confidently sell myself for roles that were quite a bit older.”
Although she was struggling with impostor syndrome at the time, Bukky wanted to challenge her perception of what she was capable of. To prepare for the role, she did a lot of self-study using free online resources.
She advised young people trying to reach six-figure salaries to look for ways to build “high-income skills” that will increase the value of their time. Bukky recommended taking classes, joining communities or boot camps, or even starting a side hustle to do this.
“Skills pay the bills. You have to build high-income skills. You don’t have to be stagnant about what your time is worth,” she added.
