Why the talent crisis in advertising is real and what comes next

No one wants to discuss entry-level jobs, but those jobs are how people obtain three years of experience and how they move into the middle management positions that keep companies functioning. Companies can keep using AI, but if employees don’t know how business systems function because they were never trained in the trenches, those companies are fragile.

So far, the industry’s response to AI’s impact on work has been counterproductive. Staff-level jobs at ad agencies in the United States are down 10% since 2022 as junior roles are treated like short-term costs to manage rather than long-term investments in capability.

The apprenticeship model, where junior employees learn by watching decisions as they’re made, building judgment over time, is also eroding. That’s a mistake.

Here’s what can be done to reverse these trends and how the industry can move forward to create a sustainable future.

Reorganizing the agency hiring model 

To start, agencies must redefine their hiring needs to ensure that future entry-level hires are not button-pushers executing routine tasks. 

A recent whitepaper published by DBC in collaboration with the 4As argues that agencies need people who can think strategically, connect dots across disciplines, understand business context, communicate clearly, demonstrate curiosity and adaptability, and use AI as a tool rather than fear it. That’s a complete departure from how agencies have traditionally hired juniors, and it’s the correct approach.

Structure matters too. Organizations should double down on early-career hiring and invest in continuous development conversations and mentorship. They should hire juniors because they believe people are the ones who drive strategy, not automation. 

Some progress is being made in this area. The 4As’ “I’m New Here” and MAIP programs create a strong strategic talent infrastructure for agencies that want to survive the next decade. However, more needs to be done industry-wide to create long-term sustainability for the agency model. 

To succeed, agencies need to invest in structured onboarding and mentorship, build development systems intentionally, hire for adaptability and critical thinking, articulate career paths clearly and shift from annual reviews to continuous learning conversations.

Those steps will help future-proof the industry.

Teaching juniors to think in business outcomes

If entry-level work is genuinely shifting from task execution to strategic thinking, then the industry must get more specific about what people are trained to think about. 

What frameworks do juniors need? What language do they need to speak?

Agencies must teach outcomes thinking — what changed and why — at the entry level, and they must do it intentionally. That includes: thinking in terms of incremental lift, not volume metrics; reading a P&L and understanding how marketing contribution connects to profit and forecast variance; knowing the difference between correlation and causation; building hypothesis tests instead of execution plans; and thinking in terms of probability to goal and risk-adjusted decisions.

Currently, juniors learn the language of channels, campaigns, impressions, CPMs and whether metrics were hit. Outcomes thinking is the opposite of that. It teaches juniors to understand the impacts of a decision and how it connects to a business. That’s judgment, and it’s trainable at entry level.

Why outcomes thinking matters

When agencies teach juniors to think this way, their positions become fundamentally harder to automate. Juniors begin building plans not just executing them, interpreting reports rather than simply running them, and deciding which channels deserve investment based on evidence not only optimizing them. 

More importantly, juniors become better partners to the clients they’ll eventually lead. Clients who move the needle on incremental revenue and margin contribution work with teams that think this way. 

When agencies finally understand that this is what they should be hiring and training for, the talent problem mostly solves itself. People who think like operators and strategists build careers at agencies; they don’t leave them.

AI is changing what agencies need to teach

AI is automating execution, which is what it is supposed to do. But it’s also creating a moment where agencies have to choose whether to use the freed-up time to ask juniors to do more execution work, or to teach them how to think.

Making that choice means being specific about what thinking skills matter. For marketing services, it starts with understanding outcomes and decision quality — not only as a strategic overlay, but as the core curriculum.

This is where structured mentorship programs and intentional development systems become powerful.

What’s next for building a sustainable talent pipeline

The industry has started to confront the problem of how to train junior employees in response to AI’s impact on work. Next, agencies must be specific about the solution. 

Beyond providing more mentorship or changing hiring methods, that includes teaching juniors about business impact, changing how they think about decisions and connecting those learnings back to their career paths.

Agencies that build deliberate training systems around outcomes thinking will attract better talent, retain employees longer and produce better client work. Agencies that continue hiring for task execution while hoping mentorship solves their problems will continue to lose people.

Partner insights from Keen Decision Systems