If we stop hiring juniors and lose our seniors, who teaches the middle?

In this exclusive opinion piece for CB, MettleLab Co-Founders Sara Pethybridge (left) and Izzy Watts (right) look at how fewer junior roles, senior redundancies and leaner teams are reshaping the advertising career ladder, and what needs to replace the learning that used to happen along the way.

 

There is something strange happening to the advertising career ladder. At the bottom, junior opportunities are getting harder to find. At the top, restructuring is putting experienced people back into an already crowded employment market. In the middle, agencies are running leaner teams and asking the people who remain to cover more ground.

Each of those things makes sense when you look at it separately. Put them together and there’s a question we should probably be asking: where is the industry’s next generation of experienced people supposed to come from?

The latest Advertising Council Australia Salary Survey gives some shape to what’s happening. Overall agency headcount is down 4.5 per cent. ACA says increased movement among junior and mid-tier staff is happening as agencies adapt to leaner operating models. Only 44 per cent of agencies now maintain a formal learning and development budget.

Those figures follow an unusually tough period. ACA’s previous survey recorded an 11 per cent redundancy rate, compared with its usual range of 5 to 7 per cent. The global numbers are difficult to ignore too. Omnicom expects its headcount to reduce by around 15,000 during 2026 as it integrates IPG, although that figure includes outsourcing, offshoring and disposals as well as job losses. Dentsu has also been cutting thousands of roles globally.

Redundancy figures fail to capture the true cost of losing experienced staff. When a senior person leaves, a business doesn’t only lose a salary and a job title. It can lose years of institutional memory: the person who remembers why a particular approach didn’t work last time, who knows where a budget is likely to come unstuck, or who can spot the early signs of a problem because they’ve seen a version of it before. That knowledge rarely appears on an org chart, but younger people have traditionally learnt a lot from being around it.

There are plenty of commercial reasons behind all of this. Margins are tight. Businesses are consolidating. Clients want more for their budgets. Technology is changing the work.

But there’s another consequence that deserves attention: advertising has always depended on having people at different stages of their careers working alongside each other. Production certainly has.

When we started out, a lot of the work given to junior people wasn’t glamorous. You pulled together quotes. Updated estimates. Chased suppliers. Sat in meetings where you didn’t really understand why everyone had suddenly become concerned about one apparently innocuous sentence in the brief.

Eventually, you did understand.

That work gave you repetitions. It also put you near people who had already made the mistakes you hadn’t made yet.

There was another useful thing about junior work that we rarely talk about: it gave you somewhere to be inexperienced. You could take on a piece of a job without carrying the whole thing. You could get something wrong and have a more experienced person catch it. You could watch how somebody handled a difficult conversation before you were the person expected to have it.

A lot of the repetitive work we’d happily automate wasn’t valuable because updating an estimate is inherently character-building. It was valuable because it happened alongside the rest of the job. While doing the basic stuff, junior people were listening, watching and slowly learning why certain decisions mattered. Industries change and develop with time but we need to think about what replaces the learning that happened around it.

AI complicates this because some of the work most easily automated is exactly the sort of routine work that has traditionally sat at the beginning of a career. However, the evidence requires nuanced interpretation; Australian data does not prove that AI is outright replacing junior advertising roles. But there are signs that entry-level work itself is changing.

PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer analysed more than one billion job ads. Its US analysis found that entry-level roles with high AI exposure were seven times more likely than low-exposure junior roles to demand skills traditionally associated with more experienced workers, including judgement and leadership. PwC calls it the “seniorisation” of entry-level work. That’s a useful description of something we’re beginning to recognise in advertising.

We want juniors who can think strategically, manage stakeholders, exercise judgement, understand the commercial implications of their decisions and use the new tools. All reasonable things to want. The awkward bit is that those are skills people usually develop by doing the work. This becomes particularly interesting when it meets another industry trend: hybridisation.

As teams get leaner, the edges between roles are getting less tidy. In production, that can mean a producer getting involved earlier in the client and creative conversation, interrogating the brief, thinking about rights and usage, working out how one shoot becomes dozens of deliverables and considering post before a frame has been shot. At the same time, production decisions on smaller jobs can sit with account managers, project managers, creatives or internal brand teams.

That’s not necessarily a bad development. In many cases it makes perfect sense. But it does mean people are carrying decisions that once sat across several different roles, and they need enough knowledge to understand the consequences of those decisions.

There are good things about that. Some of the best people we’ve worked with have always been difficult to squeeze into a job description. Understanding more than one part of the business makes you better at your own job. But broader jobs require broader capability, and that takes time to build and that’s why the combination of fewer junior opportunities, senior redundancies and leaner teams should concern us beyond the immediate employment numbers.

At one end, we’re reducing some of the lower-risk work that gave people room to learn. At the other, we’re losing some of the experienced people who carried the industry’s institutional knowledge. And in between, we’re asking people to take on broader roles and exercise more judgement, often earlier in their careers.

The answer isn’t to protect every junior task from technology. Nobody benefits from spending three years doing repetitive admin simply because that’s how the person above them learnt the job. Nor should we preserve bloated structures for the sake of a traditional career ladder.

The opportunity is to get much more deliberate about what replaces those things.

If technology takes away some of the repetitive work people once learnt through, junior roles need other ways to build judgement. If teams are leaner, mentoring can’t depend entirely on whether somebody happens to have a generous senior person sitting beside them. If account managers, project managers and producers are going to work across broader remits, their development needs to reflect the jobs they’re actually doing.

At the moment, the numbers suggest we’re moving in the opposite direction. Fewer than half of the agencies in ACA’s latest data have a formal L&D budget. Training won’t solve every part of this. People need exposure to real jobs, good managers, room to make decisions and experienced people around them. But leaving development to osmosis makes less sense when we’re changing the conditions that allowed osmosis to happen.

Advertising has always been good at adapting the way we make the work. We’re doing that again now, and some of the changes will make the industry faster, more flexible and more interesting.

The part we haven’t worked out yet is how someone entering advertising today gets from capable junior to experienced operator when the steps between the two are changing underneath them. That’s worth figuring out before we discover we’ve built a very efficient industry with nobody left to teach the next lot how to run it.

 

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