“Junior talent will always be necessary in business”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“I’m a final-year undergraduate student majoring in Product Design, currently interning as a visual designer at a traditional publishing company, focusing on book cover design. My work involves translating editorial content and market positioning into visual concepts, while collaborating with editors and responding to commercial requirements. As I have just entered the industry, I find that design decisions are often subject to multiple opinions and constraints, which can be challenging to navigate. At times, this makes me question how to maintain my original passion for design and sustain long-term creative motivation, especially in an environment shaped by efficiency and emerging AI tools.

In the current visual production environment dominated by AI-generated tools, the value of basic execution-level designers is being rapidly compressed. How do you view the future career path of junior designers? For those who are just entering the industry, which skills should they prioritize developing to avoid being replaced by tools and to establish long-term competitiveness in both creative and business aspects?”

Alex Bec, co-founder of It’s Nice That, Creative Lives in Progress and If You Could Jobs:

Hey there. Well done on landing internship while studying – that’s very impressive and invaluable experience, so you’re already starting on the right foot.

The key at your early career stage is to learn absolutely everything you can from any professional experience. You should see every opportunity as a learning opportunity and getting the chance to see all the good (and bad!) that comes along with it is wonderful. Don’t worry too much about providing tons of value, or doing really excellent work, that will come.

You’re also right to observe that the industry and day to day work is changing rapidly, so the fact you have a front row seat to the real workings and demands of working in design today should be seen as a huge plus – even if you don’t necessarily like what you see. The more understanding you have, the better decisions you can make in the future.

As for future career paths of junior designers; this for me is the million dollar question, that truthfully no one has a definitive answer to. In my opinion, junior talent will always be necessary in business. Maybe not for doing the design tasks we’re used to, but providing fresh perspective, ideas and context to more good organisations who are thinking about the future.

It feels like a cliché to say, but first up, learn the tools that are coming into our industry. Get deeply curious and excited about what the technology can enable, and then make sure you’re honing that expertise in your work. Experiment. Have fun. Get really familiar with the key AI tools shaping how work is made.

Secondly, you can’t forget softer skills either. Balance your own personal (dare I say human) development with the technology and you’ll give yourself the best chance for exciting career developments. Learn about communication, storytelling, giving and receiving feedback, critical thinking, lateral thinking, delegation, negotiation and everything that goes into navigating a career regardless of the technology (there’s loads of great resources for this stuff on our sister platform Creative Lives in Progress under their guides and resources).

Most of all try and bring yourself to work. No one needs another cookie-cutter designer who thinks the same way as everyone else. Be yourself, be reliable and valuable and be connected to the technology that will continue to shape our industry.

As a junior you should have more space and time to experiment, make the most of it! Remember a creative career should be fun, explorative. If you’re not getting that out of your day to day job due to constraints outside of your control – don’t neglect it in your time outside of work…