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Last week I wrote about recent graduate Ahmed. His blog post was thoughtful. Articulate. Emotionally honest. He argues the job market is broken. A lot of people agreed with him. And here’s where I’m going to be unpopular: This isn’t a job market problem. It’s a positioning problem. I took one look at his resume and immediately saw why he’s not getting traction — despite being objectively capable. This is a resume that says: “Please invest 10 minutes of cognitive effort to appreciate how smart I am.”
Recruiters have 7.4 seconds. His resume reads like a research paper, not a hiring document.
It doesn’t guide the eye. It overwhelms it. On paper, Ahmed is positioning himself as both a junior candidate and a senior specialist: At. The. Same. Time. The mixed messaging is everywhere. He opens as a “Graduate”… Then swan dives into “Research”. Moments later he’s an “Architect of Systems” with full ownership to build infrastructure from the ground up… …while holding the title “Junior Intern”. You can almost hear the recruiter thinking: “Hang on. Which one is it?” Together it creates this reaction: This candidate is either: a) Too senior for this graduate role And recruiters don’t hire risk when they have 99 other safer options sitting in the pile. There’s no obvious hiring hook. Is he a Research Assistant? A Data Scientist? An ML Engineer? A Backend Engineer? The resume answers: “Yes.” Recruiters need one clear story. Ahmed wrote about how automation and AI have hollowed out the middle of the market. But his resume is trying to sit in the middle. Not junior enough to feel safe. Not senior enough to feel strategic. Not narrow enough to be slot-able. That’s not a broken market. That’s unclear positioning. Here’s the part that matters. Ahmed doesn’t need more courses. He doesn’t need another side project. He doesn’t need to “just keep going”. He needs a resume that is:
The market isn’t broken. But the old advice is. “Just get more skills” doesn’t work when your problem isn’t competence. It’s clarity. ~Lisa Your Q&AI Hate AI Hi Lisa, I work in digital arts / animation and have a strong aversion to AI. But I am concerned that this may seriously hamper my career if I have a militant or un-yielding attitude about it. Your thoughts? Sam Hi Sam, I’m going to be annoyingly direct, because that’s what you wrote in for. Yes. A militant, un-yielding stance on AI will limit your career. Not because AI is magical. Not because robots are about to replace you tomorrow. But because industries don’t care about our personal aversions. They care about outcomes. Now — before you throw your stylus at me — let’s slow this down. You work in digital arts/animation. That space touches everything: advertising, gaming, film, corporate comms, education, UX, marketing, architecture, medical visualisation. It’s not one neat little creative bubble. And I suspect (gently) that you might have a slightly narrow view of what “AI” actually looks like in your industry. I’m currently writing content for our Master of Screen Production students. Even in that space — which is deeply creative — AI is not a side note. It’s part of the conversation. Not as “replace all creatives”. But as:
Roles aren’t vanishing in a puff of smoke. They’re shifting. Scope changes. Tools change. Expectations change. The better questions (and the ones I pose to ECU students) are:
Notice none of those questions are: “How do I avoid AI forever?” Look, you don’t have to love it. You don’t have to use it in every project. You don’t have to tattoo ChatGPT on your forearm. But refusing to understand it? That’s the risky bit. It’s a bit like a graphic designer in 2004 saying, “I have a strong aversion to Adobe Creative Suite. I prefer pencils.” Cool. You can prefer pencils. But the market moved anyway. There’s a great talk by futurist Mike Walsh that I often reference with students. He reframes AI not as a creative thief, but as an amplifier. That shift in thinking is worth sitting with — even if you end up disagreeing. So my advice is to research your niche. Look at industry trend reports. Read what commissioning editors are talking about. Follow studios that are experimenting with AI-assisted pipelines. Because here’s the thing. The creatives who survive big shifts aren’t the loudest protestors. They’re the curious ones. You don’t need to surrender your ethics. But you do need to stay relevant. Thanks for writing in. ~Lisa |
