Pay, privilege and untapped potential: Uncovering the junior experience

The creative industry talks a lot about championing new talent, but what’s the reality for those actually starting out? The Junior founder Lánre Adeleye has created a national survey to uncover just that – capturing the lived experiences of junior creatives across the UK, from pay and hiring to career progression and postcode privilege. Whether you're freelance, full-time, in-house or somewhere in between – your insights will help shape a clearer picture of what it really means to build a creative career today. Here, Lánre explains more about the survey, and what motivated him to create it.

An industry embracing change, or performance?

The creative industry is brilliant at branding its values. It knows the language of inclusion, progress and investment in the next generation. It talks about equity. It posts about accessibility. It platforms a few and positions that as change. But when you've sat on the outside long enough, you start to notice how much of it is performance.

For years before I landed my first creative role, I tried to convince myself that the system would catch up. If I kept showing up, emailing, designing, teaching myself and working for free, surely someone would eventually ‘let me in’.

Lánre speaking at D&AD Festival 2024 - Photography by Owen Billcliffe

A problem of pay, privilege and untapped potential

What I've come to realise is this: the system isn't broken. It was built like this. It was built to reward familiarity rather than potential, and to favour polish over hunger. It will champion fresh ideas only when they come from familiar mouths.

I’ve seen talented, driven, resilient junior creatives paid less than what’s liveable in London. I’ve seen people work unpaid for weeks on the promise of “experience”. I know people (and myself included) who relocated from cities they loved because opportunity was postcode-locked to the capital. I've met creatives who've taken on multiple jobs just to remain in an industry that claims to want them. The same industry that praises “diversity” still filters for Oxbridge and nepotism behind closed doors.

And yet, despite all of that, we stay – to create and contribute. Because creativity has always been more than a job title. For many of us, it’s survival and it’s expression. It’s a way to turn what we’ve lived through into something that might move or matter to someone else. But what if we stopped assuming we already know what juniors need, and dared to ask?

Handing juniors the mic

What if we asked: What are junior creatives really earning? Who's actually progressing, and who's hitting a wall? What if junior talent didn’t have to move to be seen? Who‘s still locked out, even when they're “let in”? What would change everything?

These questions are based on my lens and experiences, but I know I'm not alone. I know too many people with stories that sound just like mine, people who have taken the long way in, or who are still trying to get through the side door. People who are told to be patient, to keep working harder, to take what they can get. While the creative industry might listen to these stories anecdotally, what it lacks is more detailed data, concrete evidence and facts that can't be written off as one-off experiences.

We need more than stories whispered in private DMs or shared over coffee after a panel talk. We need something collective. Something undeniable. Something that not only reflects the barriers, but begins to map the way forward. Most importantly, we need junior creatives to speak for themselves. To be asked, not spoken for. To tell us, in their own words and from their own perspective, what this industry looks like through their lens.

Go to the-junior.com to complete the survey

Emerging workers unite

That's why we built The Junior, a platform created for and by junior creatives, to support, connect and advocate for the next generation. We've always believed that community, honesty and access should sit at the heart of the creative industry. And now, we're taking that belief further.

We’re asking those questions properly. Not to tick boxes, but to expose patterns, challenge assumptions and push for something better. It's called The State of the Junior, and it's a national survey capturing what it's really like to start and build a creative career in the UK today.

Because real change starts when we stop speaking for people, and start listening to them. And it's time we started listening to junior creatives.

Fill out the survey here