New crop of post-secondary classes aim to teach students the art of influencing

Mckenzie Dorie is shown in this handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout

TORONTO — Until last year, communications instructor Lara Cardoso saw an influencer-shaped hole in the University of Guelph-Humber’s course offerings.

The school aims to prepare students for the workforce, but Cardoso said those wading into the so-called creator economy, in which sponsored social media posts are marketing gold, have long had to learn on the job.

“There was no course centred around influencer marketing or influencer relations or the creator economy,” she said. “I was also teaching social media strategies ... and students seemed to be super interested in: what is a content creator? How can I be one? How do we work with one?”

These are among the questions she answers in “Influencer Marketing (And What Comes Next),” a fourth-year course she designed for the media and communications studies program — one of several that have cropped up across Canada to better prepare pupils for an ever-evolving online economy.

Cardoso’s students learned about working for brands that work with influencers on marketing campaigns, offering them a peek at what those companies are looking for and how they find it. But the students were also tasked with making their own content.

“There’s this opportunity to kind of act and play as a content creator and open that space for students to create a piece of content and think in their head, ‘Is this something I want to do every day?’ Because it’s a lot of work,” she said.

That work includes everything from short- and long-term planning, organizing photo and video shoots, acting as an art director on those shoots, editing the visuals, writing captions and co-ordinating with corporate sponsors — all while cultivating a personal brand, she said.

“A lot of folks are really interested in creating their own schedule and they’re creating their career. And what does that look like? Maybe not having a super traditional nine-to-five job. I think that is very attractive for a lot people.”

That was true for recent grad Mckenzie Dorie, 21, who took Cardoso’s class last semester.

When she first started making TikTok videos at 16 — “during COVID, as most people did” — she wanted to make content creation her career.

She grew up watching the so-called “Brit Crew,” a group of English YouTubers who had amassed tens of millions of subscribers combined by the mid-2010s, so a career posting on social media had always seemed like a possibility.

“I wanted it to be a full-time job,” she recalled. “But realistically, it’s just very difficult to get there. But I do feel like content creation has helped me a lot.”

Dorie’s “Star Wars”-focused short videos have earned her nearly 60,000 followers on TikTok, and another 1,800 on Instagram. She’s also had a couple of brand deals — one with a manufacturer of lightsabers and another with a computer company — but so far hasn’t made much money. Instead, she gets sent merchandise that she posts about. Career influencing is still on the table for her, but these days she thinks of herself as more of a content creator: not someone seeking to influence people’s choices, but rather a person who makes short-form videos for social media. The two roles have overlap, but aren’t always the same.

She said Cardoso’s class gave her a better sense of what brands look for in influencers they partner with.

“We talked a lot about why we connect with influencers,” Dorie said. “Although I always try to be myself no matter what, I really want to focus on being authentic and true to myself and how I feel, because I feel like that’s the best way to connect.”

In addition to the course at the University of Guelph-Humber, George Brown College has a whole two-year program dedicated to influencer marketing. In Quebec, publicly funded colleges known as CEGEPs in Trois-Rivières and Limoilou have both developed courses to train influencers.

A 2023 study out of the University of Windsor found that of the 750 16- to 30-year-olds they surveyed, 75 per cent answered “yes” or “maybe” when asked if they wanted to be a social media influencer.

Fifty-seven per cent of those listed money as the reason, while 46 per cent said they wanted to try new products and services.

Though social media influencers are by their nature highly visible, their number in Canada seems to be relatively small.

According to Statistics Canada, less than 0.2 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 69 were paid to create content for online platforms last year. That’s roughly 40,000 people. However, the government agency cautioned the number should be taken with a grain of salt because of the smaller-than-ideal sample.

Garrett Gaudet, who will teach a one-day workshop on influencing at Fanshawe College in November, said that could be because of differences in how the platforms operate north of the border.

“As a Canadian content creator, sometimes it’s more difficult,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of the programs you see stateside or in other countries.”

While YouTube allows Canadians to monetize their videos and get a share of the ad revenue from their views, TikTok does not. It does have a creator program in the United States that offers users money based on views, but it’s never been available in Canada. Instead, Canadian TikTokers can only make money through corporate sponsorships.

And content creators don’t have to have huge followings to get those brand deals, he said.

“A lot of people who are developing their personal brands (on social media) will ask me: ‘Hey, am I big enough?’” he said.

And often, the answer is yes, Gaudet said. So-called “micro-influencers” with four- or five-figure followings can be appealing to big companies because they’re less expensive to work with and seem more authentic to their audiences.

He said his students often ask him about influencing, and while his single-day class won’t teach them everything they need to know, it will give them a jumping-off point.

“It’s something that when I first got started in like the early 2010s, I would have loved to have,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 23, 2025.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press