Cat How

Cat How, CEO and Founder at HOW+HOW

Prediction: the industry will have to rebuild the bottom rung on purpose

Almost everyone's prediction for junior creatives is the same. AI takes the bottom rung, the ladder gets shorter, and graduates fight over fewer seats. The Census backs that up. Junior roles are now just 21.9% of UK vacancies, down 6.8% in a single year.

My prediction is about what comes next. Around 2028 (ish?), the industry will realise it has quietly stopped producing middleweights.

Juniors used to learn on the work machines now do in seconds: resizing a campaign into forty formats, or writing the first clumsy draft of a headline. Studios are banking that saving right now. What nobody is pricing in is that this work was never really about the output. It was where you built taste, and a helluva lot of grit. You learn what good looks like by making a lot of bad work in front of someone who tells you exactly why it's bad. Sometimes that someone was shouting at you. You also grow a few hairs on your chest because you failed, in public, over and over again. It was harsh, but it was the only way to properly… grow.

Take that away and in three years there's a hole in the middle of every agency. Seniors will be stretched thin, with nobody below them who has put in the hours to step up.

So I think the smartest studios will start hiring juniors again, deliberately, as an investment in judgement. Some of that training will be knowingly inefficient, making by hand what a tool could make faster, because there's no other way to train an eye. For context: pilots still log their flight hours even though autopilot exists.

For people starting out, this changes what you bring to the interview. When a machine can produce the competent version of anything, competence stops proving much. Studios will hire for evidence that you can tell good from nearly good, and explain why. I'd rather see the routes someone killed, and their reasons, than another polished final.

And learn to write! When average copy costs nothing, a distinctive voice becomes the scarcest thing in the room. I started out as a journalist. The habit of hunting for the sharpest true sentence has served me better as a creative director than any piece of software.

The bottom rung will come back. But this time, someone will have to build it on purpose.