A D&AD Ambassador pens an open letter to emerging creatives

Here's the number that's been passed around our industry like bad news at a funeral.

In 2024, 56% of UK agencies employed a graduate trainee or apprentice. By the 2025 census from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), this number had dropped to 43.4%. Employees aged 25 and under fell by 19.2% in twelve months. Wow. The conclusion writes itself: AI ate the juniors.

Except, let's look closer.

What the data actually says

In the same census, 88.3% of agencies said AI was having a considerable impact on how they work. Only 8% had actually cut headcount because of it, although another 24% expected to.

Mmm. A lot of expectation… Not much event.

And expectation is doing the damage here – because I strongly believe it's expectation, not technology, that stops someone opening a junior role today.

Dig a little deeper still, and these statistics get even more interesting. In 2025, according to the IPA, total agency headcount fell 6.8%. But creative agencies shed 14.3%, while media agencies grew 2.4%. That's not a machine replacing craft; that's a symptom of clients cutting creative budgets.

The UK's overall hiring rate sat at –14% year on year in April 2026, with every tracked industry in decline. The government's own entry-level snapshot is blunt about what that proves: the data is "consistent with AI having an impact on entry-level hiring in these roles, but this should not be considered causal evidence of AI's impact." (GOV.UK)

In the US, Yale's Budget Lab has spent two years hunting for AI's fingerprint on the labour market since ChatGPT launched. Its April 2026 update found no substantial acceleration: the shifts it can see were already underway in 2021.

Different market, different measure. But when the biggest studies going still can't find the culprit, be careful who you let write your obituary.

Youth is your advantage, not your liability

I'll let you in on a little secret that not many people are talking about: the most valuable fluency (and indeed currency) in our industry right now is in tools that didn't exist when most senior people trained.

You have it. They don't.

Arguably every director I know is quietly relearning how to work. You're not relearning anything. You started here.

At HOW+HOW, we've actually made that official. Our juniors and mid-weights teach our seniors and directors how to use AI – not as a nice gesture, but as a structure woven into agency life (a presentation to the team every 8–10 weeks on learnings and best practice). It's locked in the diary. We crack open a beer and listen to what those some might deem "the least experienced people in the room" have learnt. Of course, they're all 10,000% more experienced in AI wizardry than any senior or director will ever be.

They present. We sit back. Our jaws drop open in amazement: they rule.

It works because it's true. Experience is a brilliant thing to have when the ground is stable. When the ground moves, it's simply ballast.

Shape your ambition before someone else does

Which leads me to ambition. Most people think ambition is something you're born with. Like confidence, or talent, or even luck. It isn't. Ambition is designed. And if you're not shaping it deliberately, your environment will shape it for you – and right now (sadly), your environment is telling you the door is closed.

I started as a journalist, writing about design from the outside. I didn't begin knowing I'd build a global agency operating from London and Los Angeles. I had to shape my own ambition into a vision that was mine, not borrowed from someone else's playbook.

Because vague ambition creates anxiety. Shaped ambition creates clarity.

So don't ask how to get into an industry that looks shut. Ask what you're actually building, and who you want to build it with. That question has never been closed to anybody.

And to the rest of us

The IPA's Director General, Paul Bainsfair, put it plainly: the steep fall in entry-level roles "raises real questions about future capability." He's right. An industry that stops making new creatives stops making anything at all in about a decade.

So, design leaders: hire one junior (the wonderful folks atCLIP can help with this). Pay them properly. Put them in the room where decisions get made. Then let them teach you something.

If you truly can't hire, mentor. Set a brief. Review portfolios at New Blood. Answer that LinkedIn DM. You know who you are.

So, kids...

As with every generation before you, entering the jobs market is going to be tough – just in different ways.

I'm not going to pretend it'll be easy. Because it isn't, and it won't be.

But that's OK. Because the thing everyone keeps calling your disadvantage is the only real advantage in the room. So use it.

Cat How is CEO and Founder of HOW+HOW, a brand strategy and rebrand identity agency with studios in London and Los Angeles. She is D&AD Jury President of the New Brand Identity category 2026, is a D&AD Shift Mentor and D&AD Global Ambassador.