The Last Generation of Account People
I was 25, standing in a lift in Kuala Lumpur, about to present an 80-page competitive analysis to clients from Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. I'd spent three weeks building this thing: mapping every competitor move across the diaper category, charting Pampers' partnership plays with Mickey Mouse, Mamypoko's Japanese quality messaging paired with Sanrio characters, Huggies' promotional cadence. Retail promotions, online banners, social ads, the occasional TV spot. Product superiority, pricing strategies, promotional impact, distribution accessibility. All of it meticulously documented, analyzed, triangulated to find the strategic white space where our challenger brand could actually win.
My boss had flown in from Singapore with me for this presentation. Throughout the entire journey (the flight, the taxi ride, the walk through the lobby) she hadn't mentioned who would be presenting. I'd assumed it would be her. That was the normal choreography: the senior person presents, the junior person builds the deck and sits quietly in the corner taking notes, maybe fielding a question or two if called upon.
But as I pressed the button for the 2nd floor, I couldn't take the uncertainty anymore and just asked her outright.
She looked at me, utterly calm, and said: "You. You did the work, so you present it."
I wasn't prepared for that. Not mentally, not emotionally. But there I was, ninety minutes later, standing in front of a room full of clients and agency teams from three markets, walking them through findings I knew inside and out but had never imagined I'd be defending alone. Throughout the presentation, my boss would slide me post-it notes from her seat. On-the-spot feedback. One of them read: "Stop saying ummmm." Which, predictably, made me say "ummmm" even more. It was an absolute sweat fest, but it was also the moment I learned to always be double-prepared to present, even when it's not expected. I learned how to take feedback in real time without falling apart. How to pivot on the spot. How to trust that I knew the work well enough to defend it, even when I didn't feel ready.
That's what apprenticeship looked like. Not comfortable. Not neat. But effective. Someone cared enough to put me in the room and let me learn by doing, while staying close enough to catch me if I fell.
That Kind of Learning Doesn't Exist Anymore
Agencies stopped investing in junior people years ago. First it was the 2008 recession. Then it was margin pressure. Then COVID cuts. Then AI panic. There's always a reason. The result is the same: an entire generation that never got taught the craft. We gutted training programs. We eliminated junior roles or made them "intern positions" that pay nothing. We promoted the few remaining juniors too fast because there was no one else.
And now we wonder why the talent pipeline is broken.
What We Lost When We Abandoned Apprenticeship
The craft itself. How to read a brief. How to protect an idea through endless rounds of feedback. How to know when to push and when to let go. How to sit in a room with creative teams and feel whether the work is there yet. None of this can be learned from a LinkedIn Learning course.
Institutional knowledge. The difference between integration and homogenization. Why some clients say yes and others never will. Which battles are worth fighting. How to recognize when the process is protecting mediocrity. This knowledge used to transfer from senior to junior, project by project, pitch by pitch. Now it just evaporates.
The ability to see the work. This is the hardest thing to teach and the first thing we stopped teaching. How to look at something, a tray mat, a billboard, a campaign idea, and recognize whether it's actually good. Not whether it tests well. Not whether it's safe. Whether it's good. That instinct is learned through proximity to people who have it. And we stopped creating proximity.
The belief that junior people are worth the investment. We treated entry-level roles as disposable. So talented people stopped applying. They went client-side, where at least they'd get trained. Or they went to tech companies that actually have onboarding programs. Or they left the industry entirely.
Rebuilding Apprenticeship
I think about this a lot as I build 43 Elephants. What am I building? A consultancy, yes. But also, perhaps more importantly, a model for how the work gets done. And part of that model has to be about how the work gets learned. Because if we don't rebuild apprenticeship, we're not just losing the next generation of account people. We're losing the craft itself. The industry is about to age out. The people who learned through mentorship, who came up in agencies that invested in training, who know how to see the work - we’re leaving. Going independent. Starting our own things. Or just leaving the industry entirely because it stopped being workable. What happens when we're gone and there's no one left who knows how to teach?
I don't have all the answers yet. But I know what I'm not doing: I'm not expecting people to show up fully formed. I'm not treating junior talent as disposable. What I'm building includes space for people to learn. To make mistakes. To sit next to someone who can show them how to see. To work on things that matter, even if it's just a tray mat, and understand why everything matters.
Because the best people in this industry weren't born knowing how to do it. They were taught. By someone who cared enough to show them. And if we don't start doing that again, we won't have an industry worth saving.
Tags: Apprenticeship, Craft, Industry, Talent
