Should young designers pay senior designers to teach them?

Should young designers pay senior designers to teach them?

From Two by Two by The Ken

May 7, 2026 · 1h 15m · Season 2 · Episode 37

About this episode

The episode discusses the evolving landscape of product design education and the challenges faced by young designers in the current job market.

The old way to grow as a product designer meant doing the grunt work (button variants, banner sizes, edges cases) until your instincts calibrated. In the new world, AI does the grunt work, faster and cheaper than any junior designer ever could. And the numbers reveal this crisis : UX job postings fell 73% between 2022 and 2023. Less than 5% of tech companies hire entry-level design talent. Rapid changes are afoot and we need some reorientation So, Praveen met Jay Datta—founder of Designup, Southeast Asia’s largest design conference, and 25 years in design at Deutsche Bank, Adobe, Flipkart, and Makemytrip—and Shreyas Satish, founder of Ownpath, who has spent years trying to rebuild the apprenticeship model from outside the system to discuss that question to answer a big question: how does a 22-year-old build judgement now?

People in this episode

Host: Praveen

Guests: Jay Datta, Shreyas Satish

Topics covered

  • design education
  • apprenticeship model
  • AI in design
  • career development
  • product design
  • job market trends

Keywords

  • product design
  • junior designers
  • AI
  • job postings
  • apprenticeship
  • design conference
  • career growth

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Designup, Ownpath, Deutsche Bank, Adobe, Flipkart, Makemytrip

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