Tadhg McCarthy on why knowing what to kill is now a core creative skill

It’s a tough time for people starting out in the creative industry right now. Together with Creative Lives in Progress we asked 27 people to predict what starting a creative career will look like over the next three years.

Words: It's Nice That
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Date: 5 November 2026
Tags: Career Predictions

Starting a creative career has rarely felt harder. Junior roles are disappearing, budgets are tightening and AI is taking over much of the work that new starters once learned on. So we asked studio founders, recruiters, educators, organisations and emerging creatives themselves to predict what they think starting a creative career will look like over the next three years. What skills will matter most? How will the pipeline work? And what can people do to take advantage of new opportunities? Their answers will help shape how Creative Lives in Progress can best support emerging talent through this period and beyond.

Contributor specific paragraph.

Tadhg McCarthy, Co-Founder at Elsewhen

I’ve reviewed a lot of prototypes this year that were very impressive and completely pointless. Making something convincing is almost instantaneous now, but developing the judgement to know whether it should exist still takes time. The more we can make, the more often we need to ask who it’s for and what it actually helps them do. Knowing what to keep and what to kill is now an essential creative skill, whatever stage of your career you’re at.

Over the next three years, I think people starting a creative career will find themselves having to develop that judgement much earlier. We’ll ask them to take ideas further, test them sooner and make decisions that used to sit with more experienced colleagues. That’s a real opportunity to show what they can do, provided we remember how much they’re still learning, even when the work looks finished.

“We’ll all need to learn a new dance, and plenty of toes will get stepped on.”
Tadhg McCarthy, Co-Founder at Elsewhen

Taking an idea further also means stepping outside your own discipline. I expect whole teams to become more T-shaped, retaining depth in their craft while taking on more of the work around it. Designers will reach further left and right across the project lifecycle, and the people either side of them will do the same. For someone starting out, learning to work across those overlaps will become part of learning their craft. We’ll all need to learn a new dance, and plenty of toes will get stepped on.

Companies have a stake in getting this right. As execution becomes less of a barrier and baseline quality rises, they’ll need people whose taste and judgement can make the work stand out. AI alone won’t give you a winning product or experience. Finding and developing those people means protecting room for juniors to work through problems, make mistakes and learn alongside experienced colleagues, even when a tool could give an answer faster. Otherwise, companies risk cutting off their own supply of the skills they’ll depend on.

I expect portfolios to reflect this too. I’ll want to see how someone arrived at a polished outcome, including the work they threw away along the way. What they kept, what they killed and why will tell me more about their potential than another impressive solution to a problem nobody has.

This series has been put together in collaboration with It's Nice That's sister company Creative Lives in Progress; a creative careers resource, on a mission to transform the way emerging talent access, understand and connect with the industry. Find out more at creativelivesinprogress.com