How Do We Create Senior Designers If Juniors Don’t Get to Learn?

I saw a post recently that got me thinking.

The basic idea was simple: juniors can’t get experience without being given the opportunity to get experience.

That sounds obvious, but somewhere along the way, we’ve made “experience” one of the requirements for getting experience.

And now AI is changing that even more.

AI can create layouts, generate images, write copy, make variations, clean things up, and get you to something that looks pretty good in a fraction of the time.

That’s useful. I use AI too.

But it also makes me wonder what happens to the junior designer who was supposed to spend those hours doing the work.

Because those hours weren’t wasted.

Those were the reps.

Those were the projects where you tried something, realized it looked terrible, changed it, tried something else, asked someone why it wasn’t working, and eventually started understanding why something worked before anyone had to tell you.

That’s how you build a design eye.

You Don’t Become Experienced Without Doing the Work

One of the strangest things about looking for jobs in this industry is seeing “entry level” positions that want years of experience.

But where exactly is that experience supposed to come from?

Someone has to give you the first project.

Someone has to let you make the first mistake.

Someone has to look at your work and say, “This isn’t quite there yet. Here’s why.”

And then you have to go back and fix it.

That’s how you learn.

I’ve never been someone who believes you need to know everything before you can start doing something.

Honestly, I’ve built a career doing the opposite.

Give me the problem.

I’ll figure it out.

Maybe I don’t know the platform yet. Maybe I haven’t used that particular program. Maybe I’ve never done that exact thing before.

That doesn’t mean I can’t learn it.

It means I haven’t learned it yet.

There Are Some Things You Only Learn From the Reps

You can teach someone typography.

You can teach them color theory.

You can teach grids, hierarchy, composition, spacing and all of the other fundamentals.

Those things matter.

But there is another part of design that is much harder to teach.

Judgment.

Knowing that something feels off even when you can’t immediately explain why.

Knowing when you’ve added too much.

Knowing when the client’s idea isn’t actually solving the problem they’re trying to solve.

Knowing when something looks good but doesn’t function well.

Knowing when a design is trying way too hard.

Knowing when to leave something alone.

You develop that by doing the work.

You do it over and over and over again.

You see what works.

You see what doesn’t.

You make mistakes.

You learn from them.

Eventually, you start seeing things differently.

That’s experience.

AI Is Really Good at Producing an Answer

And this is where I think the conversation gets more complicated.

I’m not anti-AI.

Far from it.

I use it.

It can be incredibly helpful, especially when you’re trying to get through a project quickly, explore ideas, work through a problem or get past a blank page.

But AI is very good at giving you an answer.

And that’s exactly what makes me wonder about junior designers.

Because the junior designer used to be the person making all those attempts.

They were creating the five layouts that didn’t work before they found the sixth one that did.

They were spending an afternoon trying to get something right.

They were figuring out why the spacing looked weird.

They were learning how to talk to a client who changed their mind three times.

They were making mistakes.

And those mistakes were teaching them.

So the question I’m more interested in isn’t:

“Can AI do the work?”

Obviously, in many cases, it can.

The question is:

“What happens to the person who was supposed to learn by doing that work?”

That’s the part I don’t think we’ve figured out yet.

I’ve Been the Person Who Had to Figure It Out

A lot of what I know didn’t come from someone sitting me down and teaching me everything I needed to know.

I learned because I had a job to do.

A client needed something.

A website wasn’t working.

A design wasn’t right.

A platform did something I didn’t expect.

Something broke.

Something needed to be figured out before a deadline.

So I figured it out.

I’ve learned web design, graphic design, marketing, SEO, accessibility, analytics, photography, content and a ridiculous number of other things because the work required me to learn them.

And I’ve learned plenty of things the hard way too.

That’s part of it.

That’s actually one of the things I value most about experience.

You start recognizing problems because you’ve already seen them.

You know what questions to ask because you’ve already been burned by not asking them.

You know what can go wrong because you’ve watched it go wrong before.

You develop shortcuts because you spent years learning the long way.

That’s something you can’t get from simply knowing how to use a piece of software.

And it’s why I’ve never been particularly worried about not knowing every single tool an employer lists on a job description.

I’ve had employers ask if I know a particular program, and sometimes the answer is no.

But my answer has always basically been:

I can learn it.

I’ve been doing that my entire career.

The tool can be learned.

The ability and willingness to learn is a much bigger thing.

We Still Need to Let People Be Juniors

I think this is the part we need to be careful about.

A junior designer is supposed to be a junior designer.

They aren’t supposed to already have 10 years of experience.

They aren’t supposed to have senior-level judgment.

They aren’t supposed to know every program, every platform and every possible answer.

They’re supposed to be learning.

And if we automate every entry-level task because AI can do it faster, we need to think about what that means five or ten years from now.

Because those junior designers are supposed to become the people with five years of experience.

Then ten years.

Then 15.

They’re supposed to become the senior designers.

But how do we create senior designers if we don’t give people the opportunity to become them?

That’s the part that worries me.

Not AI itself.

The loss of the learning process.

So What Do We Do With AI?

I don’t think the answer is to keep AI away from junior designers.

That doesn’t make sense either.

They need to learn how to use it.

They need to understand what it’s good at and where it falls apart.

They need to know how to question what it gives them.

And they need to learn how to recognize when the answer is technically fine but creatively, strategically or functionally wrong.

Maybe that’s actually where some of the new learning happens.

Let juniors use AI to create variations.

Then have them explain why one works better than another.

Let them critique AI-generated work.

Have them fix the bad parts.

Have them create something themselves and compare it to what AI produced.

Let them figure out why their version works better in one situation and why the AI version might work better in another.

Teach them accessibility.

Teach them hierarchy.

Teach them typography.

Teach them usability.

Teach them how to think about the actual person using the thing they’re designing.

Most importantly, give them real problems to solve.

Because that’s where the experience comes from.

AI doesn’t have to be the thing that replaces the learning process.

It can become part of the learning process.

The Next Generation Still Needs the Reps

I don’t think we need to protect junior designers from AI.

I think we need to make sure we’re not accidentally taking away the very experiences that turn them into experienced designers.

Because eventually, every senior designer was a junior.

Every experienced designer had a first project.

Every person who seems to “just know” when something isn’t working had to learn that somewhere.

They got the reps.

They made mistakes.

They tried again.

They learned.

And eventually, they developed that instinct.

AI is going to change the way we work. There’s no question about that.

But I hope we don’t get so focused on how much faster we can produce things that we forget that learning how to produce good things takes time.

The goal shouldn’t be to protect junior designers from AI.

The goal should be to make sure AI doesn’t eliminate the opportunities they need to become senior designers.