The Design Industry Created Its Own Talent Crisis. AI Just Made It Worse.

This is the first part in a three-part series about the design talent crisis. Read Part II and Part III.

Part I: The Vanishing Bottom Rung

Erika Kim’s path to UX design represents a familiar pandemic-era pivot story, yet one that reveals deeper currents about creative work and economic necessity. Armed with a 2020 film and photography degree from UC Riverside, she found herself working gig photography—graduations, band events—when the creative industries collapsed. The work satisfied her artistic impulses but left her craving what she calls “structure and stability,” leading her to UX design. The field struck her as an ideal synthesis, “I’m creating solutions for companies. I’m working with them to figure out what they want, and then taking that creative input and trying to make something that works best for them.”

Since graduating from the interaction design program at San Diego City College a year ago, she’s had three internships and works retail part-time to pay the bills. “I’ve been in survival mode,” she admits. On paper, she’s a great candidate for any junior position. Speaking with her reveals a very thoughtful and resourceful young designer. Why hasn’t she been able to land a full-time job? What’s going on in the design job market? 

Back in January, Jared Spool offered an explanation. The UX job market crisis stems from a fundamental shift that occurred around late 2022—what he calls a “market inversion.” The market flipped from having far more open UX positions than qualified candidates to having far more unemployed UX professionals than available jobs. The reasons are multitude, but include expiring tax incentives, rising interest rates, an abundance of bootcamp graduates, automated hiring processes, and globalization.

But that’s only part of the equation. I believe there’s something much larger at play, one that affects more than just UX or product design, but all design disciplines. One in which the tip of the spear has already been felt by software developers in their job market. AI.

Closing Doors for New Graduates

In the first half of this year, 147 tech companies have laid off over 63,000 workers, with a significant portion of them engineers. Entry-level hiring has collapsed, revealing a new permanent reality. At Big Tech companies, new graduates now represent just 7% of all hires—a precipitous 25% decline from 2023 levels and a staggering 50% drop from pre-pandemic baselines in 2019.

The startup ecosystem tells an even more troubling story, where recent graduates comprise less than 6% of new hires, down 11% year-over-year and more than 30% since 2019. This isn’t merely a temporary adjustment; it represents a fundamental restructuring of how companies approach talent acquisition. Even the most credentialed computer science graduates from top-tier programs are finding themselves shut out, suggesting that the erosion of junior positions cuts across disciplines and skill levels.  

LinkedIn executive Aneesh Raman wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that in a “recent survey of over 3,000 executives on LinkedIn at the vice president level or higher, 63 percent agreed that A.I. will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.”

There is already a harsh reality for entry-level tech workers. Companies have essentially frozen junior engineer and data analyst hiring because AI can now handle the routine coding and data querying tasks that were once the realm for new graduates. Hiring managers expect AI’s coding capabilities to expand rapidly, potentially eliminating entry-level roles within a year, while simultaneously increasing demand for senior engineers who can review and improve AI-generated code. It’s a brutal catch-22: junior staff lose their traditional stepping stones into the industry just as employers become less willing to invest in onboarding them. 

For design students and recent graduates, this data illuminates a broader industry transformation where companies are increasingly prioritizing proven experience over potential—a shift that challenges the very foundations of how creative careers traditionally begin.

While AI tools haven’t exactly been able to replace designers yet—even junior ones—the tech will get there sooner than we think. And CEOs and those holding the purse strings are anticipating this, thus holding back hiring of juniors.

Five recent design graduates. From top left to right: Ashton Landis, Erika Kim, Emma Haines. Bottom row, left to right: Leah Ray, Benedict Allen.

The Learning-by-Doing Crisis

Ashton Landis recently graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts (full disclosure: my alma mater). She says:

I found that if you look on LinkedIn for “graphic designer” and you just say the whole San Francisco Bay area, so all of those cities, and you filter for internships and entry level as the job type, there are 36 [job postings] total. And when you go through it, 16 of them are for one or more years of experience. And five of those are for one to two years of experience. And then everything else is two plus years of experience, which doesn’t actually sound like sound like entry level to me. …So we’re pretty slim pickings right now.

When I graduated from CCA in 1995 (or CCAC as it was known back then), we were just climbing out of the labor effects of the early 1990s recession. For my early design jobs in San Francisco, I did a lot of production and worked very closely with more senior designers and creative directors to hone my craft. While school is great for academic learning, nothing beats real-world experience.

Eric Heiman, creative director and co-owner of Volume Inc., a small design studio based in San Francisco, has been teaching at CCA for 26 years. He observes:

We internalize so much by doing things slower, right? The repetition of the process, learning through tinkering with our process, and making mistakes, and things like that. We have internalized those skills.

Sean Bacon, chair of the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College wonders:

What is an entry level position in design then? Where do those exist? How often have I had these companies hire my students even though they clearly don’t have those requirements. So I don’t know. I don’t know what happens, but it is scary to think we’re losing out on what I thought was really valuable training in terms of how I learned to operate, at least in a studio.

Back to the beginnings of my career, I remember digitizing logos when I interned with Mark Fox, a talented logo designer based in Marin County. A brilliant draftsman, he had inked—and still inks—all of his logos by hand. The act of redrawing marks in Illustrator helped me develop my sense of proportions, curves, and optical alignment. At digital agencies, I started my journey redesigning layouts of banners in different sizes. I would eventually have juniors to do that for me as I rose through the ranks. These experiences—though a little painful at the time—were pivotal in perfecting our collective craft. To echo Bacon, it was “really valuable training.”

Apprenticeships at Agencies

Working in agencies and design studios was pretty much an apprenticeship model. Junior designers shadowed more senior designers and took their lead when executing a campaign or designing more pages for a website.

For a typical website project, as a senior designer or art director, I would design the homepage and a few other critical screens, setting up the look and feel. Once those were approved by the client, junior designers would take over and execute the rest. This was efficient and allowed the younger staff to participate and put their reps in.

Searching for stock photos was another classic assignment for interns and junior designers. These were oftentimes multi-day assignments, but it helped teach juniors how to see. 

But today, generative AI apps like Midjourney and Visual Electric are replacing stock photography. 

From Craft to Curation

As the industry marches towards incorporating AI into our workflows, strategy, judgement, and most importantly taste, are critical skills.

But the paradoxically, how do designers develop taste, craft, and strategic thinking without doing the grunt work?

And not only are they missing out on the mundane work because of the dearth of entry-level opportunities, but also because generative AI can give results so quickly.

Eric Heiman again:

I just give the AI a few words and poof, it’s there. How do you learn how to see things? I just feel like learning how to see is a lot about slowing down. And in the case of designers, doing things yourself over and over again, and they slowly reveal themselves through that process.

Navigating the New Reality

All the recent graduates I interviewed for this piece are smart, enthusiastic, and talented. Yet, Ashton Landis and Erika Kim are struggling to find full-time jobs. 

Landis doesn’t think her negative experience in the job market is “entirely because of AI,” attributing it more to “general unemployment rates are pretty high right now” and a job market that is “clearly not great.”

Questioning Career Choices

Leah Ray, a recent graphic design MFA graduate from CCA, was able to secure a position as International Visual Designer at Kuaishou, a popular Chinese short-form video and live-streaming app similar to TikTok. But it wasn’t easy. Her job search began months before graduation, extending through her thesis work and creating the kind of sustained anxiety that prompted her final school project—a speculative design exploring AI’s potential to predict alternative career futures.

I was so anxious about my next step after graduation because I didn’t have a job lined up and I didn’t know what to do. …I’m a person who follows the social clock. My parents and the people around me expect me to do the right thing at the right age. Getting a nice job was my next step, but I couldn’t finish that, which led to me feeling anxious and not knowing what to do.

But through her tenacity and some luck, she was able to land the job that she starts this month. 

No, it was not easy to find. But finding this was very lucky. I do remember I saw a lot of job descriptions for junior designers. They expect designers to have AI skills. And I think there are even some roles specifically created for people with AI-related design skills, like AI motion designer and AI model designer, sort of something like that. Like AI image training designers.

Ray’s observation reveals a fundamental shift in entry-level design expectations, where AI proficiency has moved from optional to essential, with entirely new roles emerging around AI-specific design skills.

Our five design educators. From top left to right: Bradford Prairie, Elena Pacenti, Sean Bacon. Bottom row, left to right: Josh Silverman, Eric Heiman.

Preparing Our Students

Emma Haines, a designer completing her masters degree in Interaction Design at CCA began her job search in May. (Her program concludes in August.) Despite not securing a job yet, she’s bullish because of the prestige and practicality of the Master of Design program.

I think this program has actually helped me a good amount from where I was starting out before. I worked for a year between undergrad and this program, and between where I was before and now, there’s a huge difference. That being said, since the industry is changing so rapidly, it feels a little hard to catch up with. That’s the part that makes me a little nervous going into it. I could be confident right now, but maybe in six months something changes and I’m not as confident going into the job market.

CCA’s one-year program represents a strategic bet on adaptability over specialization. Elena Pacenti, the program’s director, describes an intensive structure that “goes from a foundational semester with foundation of interaction design, form, communication, and research to the system part of it. So we do systems thinking, prototyping, also tangible computing.” The program’s Social Lab component is “two semester-long projects with community partners in partnership with stakeholders that are local or international from UNICEF down to the food bank in Oakland.” It positions design as a tool for social impact rather than purely commercial purposes. This compressed timeline creates what Pacenti calls curricular agility: “We’re lucky that we are very agile. We are a one-year program so we can implement changes pretty quickly without affecting years of classes and changes in the curriculum.”

Josh Silverman, who chaired it for nearly five years, reports impressive historical outcomes: “I think historically for the first nine years of the program—this is cohort 10—I think we’ve had something like 85% job placement within six months of graduation.”

Yet both educators acknowledge current market realities. Pacenti observes that “that fat and hungry market of UX designers is no longer there; it’s on a diet,” while maintaining optimism about design’s future relevance: “I do not believe that designers will be less in demand. I think there will be a tremendous need for designers.” Emma Haines’s nervousness about rapid industry change reflects this broader tension—the gap between educational preparation and market evolution that defines professional training during transformative periods.

Bradford Prairie, who has taught in San Diego City College’s Graphic Design program for nine years, embodies this experimental approach to AI in design education. “We get an easy out when it comes to AI tools,” he explains, “because we’re a program that’s meant to train people for the field. And if the field is embracing these tools, we have an obligation to make students aware of them and give some training on how to use the tools.”

Prairie’s classroom experiments reveal both the promise and pitfalls of AI-assisted design. He describes a student struggling with a logo for a DJ app who turned to ChatGPT for inspiration: “It generates a lot of expected things like turntables, headphones, and waveforms… they’re all too complicated. They all don’t really look like logos. They look more like illustrations.” But the process sparked some other ideas, so he told the student, “This is kind of interesting how the waveform is part of the turntable and… we can take this general idea and redraw it and make it simplified.”

This tension between AI output and human refinement has become central to his teaching philosophy: “If there’s one thing that AI can’t replace, it’s your sense of discernment for what is good and what is not good.” The challenge, he acknowledges, lies in developing that discernment in students who may be tempted to rely too heavily on AI from the start.

The Turning Point

These challenges are real, and they’re reshaping the design profession in fundamental ways. Traditional apprenticeships are vanishing, entry-level opportunities are scarce, and new graduates face an increasingly competitive landscape. But within this disruption lies opportunity. The same forces that have eliminated routine design tasks have also elevated the importance of uniquely human skills—strategic thinking, cultural understanding, and creative problem-solving. The path forward requires both acknowledging what’s been lost and embracing what’s possible.

Despite her struggles to land a full-time job in design, Erika Kim remains optimistic because she’s so enthused about her career choice and the opportunity ahead. Remarking on the parallels of today versus the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, she says “It’s kind of interesting that I’m also on completely different grounds in terms of uncertainty. But you just have to get through it, you know. Why not?”

In the next part of this series, I’ll focus on the opportunities ahead: how we as a design industry can do better and what we should be teaching our design students. In the final part, I’ll touch on what recent grads can do to find a job in this current market.