What if experience is becoming a disadvantage?
Over the past month or so, I’ve been having some pretty gnarly conversations about the state of the design industry, especially when it comes to hiring and firing. Spend just a short amount of time online and you’ll find stories of rising unemployment, teams being culled, and junior designers struggling to find their first job.
It’s savage.
I recently heard a crazy statistic from a trusted friend that less than 5% of the design industry is made up of people aged between 20 and 25 . . . a frighteningly accurate reflection of the state of panic we currently find ourselves in.
And anyone with a bit of foresight can see the knock-on effect. If we stop giving young designers the opportunity to enter our industry, who becomes the future custodians of it?
But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
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While we are rightly incredibly worried about the people struggling to get into the design industry, I think we’ve been so busy looking at the bottom of the ladder that we haven’t noticed what’s beginning to happen closer to the top of it.
The people we assumed were safe might not be as safe as we thought.
I’m talking about the designers with 15-plus years of experience behind them. The people who did everything they were told to do and, for many years, reaped the rewards. They put in the time, mastered their craft, built their experience, and worked their way up into more senior positions.
I predict they could be facing a very different kind of problem.
How things used to work
For most of our careers, experience has been an advantage you could hang your hat on. Not just in design or the creative industries, but pretty much everywhere. The more you knew about a particular subject, the more valuable you became. This value would then be rewarded by an increasing salary or more notable position within a company’s hierarchy.
The old promise of experience was simple . . . the longer you did something, the more valuable you became to the world.
But … I’m beginning to wonder whether that equation is changing because access has changed.
The knowledge that was once locked away in ivory towers and hidden within the agency walls, knowledge that took years and years to accumulate, is now becoming easier to access. The right processes, information and best practices can be found and implemented almost immediately. You barely need to be a proficient designer anymore to competently pass ‘good enough’ work over.
Many of us will remember the painstaking Photoshop processes needed to remove blemishes, people and other background noise from an image. Now? Push a button and it’s done. My mum can do that.
If that kind of “push a button” power is now available to almost everyone, it starts to create a new set of questions. And the one that keeps rolling around my brain is…
What if the very thing that made us valuable is no longer enough to keep us that way?
When experience becomes the problem
Now, let’s be honest here . . . having experience isn’t the issue. I think the real problem is what that experience can do to a human over time.
If you’ve spent 15 or 20 years doing something a particular way, and that way has rewarded you with better jobs and bigger clients, then why the hell would you change it?
You’ve got evidence that your way works, and has done for years. So you stick to your guns. You trust the process and you continue doing things the way you always have. You rely on your network to keep feeding you work and you keep building evidence around the things you’re already competent in, developing the same skills and beavering away.
After all, you’re now in your mid-40s and changing the habits of a lifetime sounds fookin’ exhausting. The idea of having to market yourself in a completely different way feels absurd when, for most of your career, you’ve never really needed to.
Great.
Until the world changes, and by golly… how it’s changed.
I think we are now going to see experienced designers really feel the squeeze. And from many of the conversations I’ve had, I think that’s exactly where a lot of creatives are finding themselves right now . . . being squished.
Experience doesn’t just teach us what works. It teaches us to keep doing what we’ve always done because we know it works. It’s a double-edged sword. You become so attached to a version of yourself that has worked for over a decade that you forget to notice the version of the industry it worked in is disappearing.
Now for the science bit
It’s always been important for me that ideas are backed up somewhat by science otherwise I’m just another Internet twit with an opinion.
So I believe there are two things at play here: 1) Sunk cost fallacy and 2) Status quo bias.
So let’s chinwag on these for a bit.
Sunk cost fallacy is our tendency as human folk to continue investing in something because of everything we have already “sunk” into it. And as a designer with circa 20 years of experience, you can imagine that investment is astronomical.
This doesn’t just mean skills and processes. It can also mean habits, software, and ways of thinking. You probably notice this in the creative software you still use today, even when better and cheaper options are available. The idea of having to relearn something or change to something new feels like more effort than simply sticking with what you know.
So you just don’t bother.
Even when the alternative might actually be better. That is the sunk cost fallacy at play.
Status quo bias, on the other hand, is very much like a good old comfort zone. It’s our naturally inclined preference to favour what we already know rather than changing course, because the familiar feels much safer. The way we’ve always done things feels like it has less risk attached to it than the thing we haven’t tried before.
If we put these two behemoths together, you get a pretty dangerous cocktail for the more experienced creatives out there working in a space that is going through enormous, speedy change.
The more invested you become in the old way of doing things, the harder it becomes to see that the old way might no longer be enough. And at some point . . . you become the problem.
I think this is what we’re beginning to see, and what we’re going to see a lot more of over the next couple of years. Old ways, deeply embedded in an incredibly experienced generation, getting in the way of their future success.
But there is hope
Experience is still a super duper power.
Many of the humans that have built this industry over the past 15 to 20 years into what it is today have years of the good stuff. Judgment, taste, relationships, success, and a healthy dose of failures that people can not absorb overnight. The battle scars are a wonderful currency.
But I think what we need to do is stop treating all of that experience as a plan for what’s to come next. We can no longer assume the things that used to work will continue working in the same way. Yes, there will be some anomalies, human relationships will never go out of fashion, but the rest . . . I would not bet on it.
Every generation eventually has its “back in my day” moment. We didn’t have to market ourselves like this, we didn’t need to learn that, clients used to come through referrals, we didn’t need to build an audience, we didn’t need all these tools, we didn’t have to work this way.
And maybe all of that is true. But we’re not back in your day anymore, sunny Jim.
Look, you don’t need to become a new person, use every new tool and jump on every new marketing trend to evolve to the new world’s way. But you might need to challenge the old assumptions you have spent the last couple of decades accumulating with your experiences.
You might look at the young gun influencer type and think, “What a bunch of twaddle.” But what if you looked past that old version of you and see what you can learn?
For years, the relationship was pretty simple. Young designers entered the industry, sat alongside more experienced designers and learnt how things were done. Knowledge travelled down the old ladder. But if that statistic I mentioned at the beginning is anywhere close to accurate, the youngsters aren’t getting onto the ladder.
But they’re not getting the junior roles, they’re not sitting next to the creative director with 20 years of experience, they’re not getting the opportunity to learn the industry in the way many of us did before.
So, they are getting off their butts and having to figure it out for themselves.
They’re building communities, starting small businesses. They are making their own products and experimenting with entirely new ways of making a living from their creativity.
They haven’t cracked some secret code; they just don’t have any other bloody choice. I think there’s something incredibly important for experienced designers in that. For decades, we assumed the younger generation would learn from us.
Maybe now we need to learn from them.
And maybe, just maybe, the key to the future success of the experienced designer lies in learning from the less experienced.
Imagine what happens when you combine 20 years of judgement, taste, relationships, failures, and experience with the curiosity and adaptability of someone who has been forced to figure out a completely new way of doing things in the industry.
That’s when your experience becomes your advantage again, my friend.
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