Welcome to the entry-level void: what happens when junior design jobs disappear?

Light and Shade is a new series exploring the challenges at the heart of the AI-creative conversation. As AI becomes increasingly present across the creative industries, the series examines the opportunities and dilemmas our community grapples with. It is grounded in interviews with technologists, researchers, artists, designers, creative founders, writers, lecturers and environmental and computational experts, offering a fuller view of the many sides of the story of AI’s creative influence.

Not long ago, breaking into design meant applying for internships, refreshing your portfolio, and shadowing someone more experienced as you built confidence alongside capability. The industry relied on junior designers to handle volume. The work was not always glamorous, but it offered a path: learn by doing, improve by repetition, grow into leadership.

Today, that path looks less like a ladder and more like a sinkhole. The structural rituals that once welcomed young designers into the field are quietly collapsing. A mix of automated tooling, shrinking budgets and organisational shifts that prioritise speed over mentorship is eroding the traditional entry-level pipeline. What’s emerging instead is a fragile patchwork, where only the most connected, audacious or obsessed manage to carve a way in.

The disappearing rung

For generations, junior roles functioned as apprenticeships. You sat next to someone more experienced, watched how they worked and learned by osmosis while handling some of the grunt work others didn’t want. You resized images, shadowed client calls, took critique, adjusted and did it again. The grind, however rote, built muscle. And it’s exactly the kind of repetitive, pattern-driven work that AI tools now handle with ease.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that within five years artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. For creatives, that future feels more immediate than speculative. Retouching, cropping, copy variants, banner production – once standard junior fare – are now done with a single prompt.

This isn’t the first time digitisation has led to automation – and, in turn, to leaner teams. When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, it eliminated traditional typesetting jobs overnight – paste-up artists, platemakers and other previously essential production roles were no longer required. But new pathways emerged. Studios needed people who understood both traditional craft and digital tools.

This time feels different. The structures for learning are disappearing faster than new ones are forming. Remote work has accelerated this breakdown, erasing the in-person mentorship that came through proximity. Economic pressure has led many teams to skip the slow burn of junior development altogether.

Kelin Carolyn Zhang, a designer and educator who taught the course AI Software Design Studio at Rhode Island School of Design, sees the fallout firsthand: “They’re sending out portfolios and not hearing back,” she says. “It’s this kind of empty void.” Despite being fluent in the most advanced creative tools in history, her students still can’t find a way in.

The cold outreach economy

Dev Makker, who graduated from Parsons School of Design this June, embodies this new reality. Born in Mumbai, he taught himself Photoshop at age 14 and started posting his work online. By graduation, he had made over 500 cold connections on LinkedIn, refining his outreach to fit the platform’s 200-character limit. Eventually, it paid off.

Dev credits his success more to consistency than to strategy. He landed his first internship through a casual connection: he met a designer at a Type Directors Club event as a freshman, stayed in touch and later asked for portfolio feedback. When that designer needed help, Dev was top of mind. “Sometimes it’s just being in the right place at the right time,” he says. “If someone was to ask, ‘How did you get interviewed on It’s Nice That?’ The truth is, I ran into you at a party last week, and then you reached out.” (True.)

“I’m very aware that just having an internship is a rare and privileged position,” he says. “I’d say I’m part of a very, very single-digit percentage of my cohort that has one.” And not for lack of trying. “When I see my friends that don’t have jobs, it’s not because their work is worse or they’re not putting in effort,” he says. “It’s just really hard to get through.”

For those who do find opportunities, the terms are often worse than the struggle of the search. Kelin reports that her students are still chasing unpaid internships, just trying to get a foot in the door. The return of unpaid internships signals a broader deterioration – a desperate market where students accept exploitation just to gain access.

Learning without a ladder

Without the scaffolding of internships or entry-level positions, new designers are left to assemble their own. Into this void has stepped artificial intelligence: the always-available, ever-patient (and often sycophantic) teacher.

Kelin’s students are already power users. “I had one student who has three Claude subscriptions because they keep hitting the rate limits,” she says. “They get timed out of one, switch to the next. Timed out again, switch to the third.” By the end of the semester, several students told Kelin that her AI course was the most practical class they’d taken. They were using AI to write code, automate workflows and prototype ideas. For many, AI feels like an accelerant. “It’s like the travelator at the airport,” Dev says. “It speeds things up, but you still have to walk.”

But speed has its costs. Learning design through tools instead of people can shortcut the slow, formative work that builds creative muscle. Without exposure to the subtle cues of live collaboration – how a senior designer navigates client pushback, how a project pivots midstream or when to break the rules – new designers risk missing the soft skills required for real-world effectiveness.

Equally concerning is the loss of low-stakes work. The production grunt tasks that once felt tedious often served as training grounds, giving designers space to make mistakes that sharpen instincts and build pattern recognition over time. Without those reps, the foundation gets weaker.

There’s also a creeping risk of mistaking polish for progress. AI can help you generate fast, clean results, but often at the cost of deeper inquiry into voice, taste and intent. You can become fluent without becoming expressive. In a system optimised for outputs, reflection becomes optional. You can get good fast – but at what?

The belief gap

And while AI can be a powerful co-pilot, it doesn’t offer what Naheel Jawaid, founder of Silicon Valley School of Design, calls “belief capital” – that pivotal moment when someone sees your potential before you can.

“A big part of what I do is just being a coach, helping someone see their potential when they don’t see it yet,” Naheel says. “I’ve had people tell me later that a single conversation changed how they saw themselves.”

In the past, belief capital came from senior designers taking juniors under their wing. Today, those same seniors are managing instability of their own. “It’s a bit of a ‘dog eat dog world’-type vibe,” Naheel says. “It’s really hard to get mentorship right now.”

Traditional education isn’t closing the gap either. In many programmes, students receive grades, but not the kind of real-world feedback that builds confidence. Add to that the pace of tool change which has outstripped most curricula, and you have students left to bridge the gap alone. “If they’re teaching the same thing from five months ago, you’re already behind,” says Naheel.

In this vacuum, peer relationships become scaffolding. “The people around you – three, four years from now, if they’re as ambitious as you, they’re going to get to interesting places,” Naheel tells his students. “You’ll grow together. You can help each other up.”

The audacity tax

Kelin urges her students to drop perfectionism and start putting work into the world. “There’s no time for perfection anymore. Just throw spaghetti at the wall. Post things you’re excited about. That becomes your bat signal.”

She encourages them to cold message professionals, even if no job is posted. She points to a recent example: she and her co-founder at Poetry Camera (an AI camera that prints poetry) had considered hiring a studio assistant but never listed a role. Someone emailed out of the blue and got an interview. “The world belongs to those who ask,” she says.

Naheel echoes that sentiment, praising self-starting creatives with a “burning need to create”. “If you would do this even if you weren’t getting paid to, you will go miles ahead because these tools exist,” he says. “This moment in time requires you to be genuinely curious.”

But that mindset – creating even without pay – can be a heavy ask, especially in a field already known for exploiting passion. Even as a mentality, it assumes a kind of financial and emotional surplus not everyone has. Hustle, after all, is not free. It demands time, confidence and the ability to risk failure in public, often without a guaranteed return.

This is the heart of the audacity tax: a hidden cost baked into the new creative economy. If you can’t afford to work for free, to self-promote or to keep showing up when no one is watching, you fall behind. The system still favours those who can act like they already belong, even when they’re not sure they do.

Originality as the final moat

Forest Young, a design leader who’s held roles at Wolff Olins and as a senior critic at Yale, frames the core question in an AI-saturated landscape: what makes someone irreplaceable?

“Everyone’s focused on capabilities – typography, grids, colour theory – but those are the first things AI can replicate,” he says. “Then we pivot to taste, but taste alone isn’t resilient either. You can train a model on what’s tasteful.”

Real differentiation, Forest argues, comes from “taste-making”, the ability to not only recognise trends, but shape them. “That’s originality,” he says. “And originality often comes from trauma, from expressive necessity tied to something painful. That’s the seed of real creative work.”

AI thrives on averages. “Are you the weather, or are you the meteorologist?” he asks. “You won’t be taste-making if you follow the weather.”

If AI can handle technical execution and even mimic good taste, what remains is something harder to define: a point of view. The traditional apprenticeship model often buried that voice under hierarchy. The new system, for all its flaws, pushes designers to find it from day one.

Building new ladders

The traditional apprenticeship model helped shape generations of designers, but it wasn’t without its flaws. It often relied on an unspoken exchange: studios offered experience, juniors offered time and labour and both quietly absorbed any imbalance. While it created opportunity, it also left many behind.

What’s emerging now is not a new ladder, but something looser and more self-directed: cold outreach, peer-led collectives, self-organised critique circles, AI-assisted side projects. Kelin sees this self-starting mindset in her students. At a point in their careers when they once might have been trying to break into a single discipline, designers are becoming marketers, technologists and entrepreneurs by necessity.

These paths are inventive, but also uneven. Choosing yourself is only a choice if you have the means to sustain it. Too often, informal networks replicate the same inequities they’re trying to replace. The audacity tax still favours those with financial and social capital. The belief gap still limits access for those outside established networks. And the pressure to self-promote often falls hardest on those who weren’t taught to speak up.

Still there’s reason for hope. The pathways may be less defined, but they’re also more expansive. The tools for learning and sharing have never been more accessible. And as both early- and late-career designers find themselves learning these systems side by side, the dynamic is shifting. For a generation growing up with these technologies, the question isn’t just how to break in – it’s how to build something new altogether.

Dev offers advice to his classmates still searching for a foothold: “We’re all trying to hold that door open for you. We know you’re doing everything you can, and when you’re ready, we’ll be here to help you get through.”

We may never get the old ladder back. But with the right tools and enough support, we can build something more open, where there’s no single way in, and more than one way up.