How Covid shaped the next generation of talent

Young creatives have been disproportionately affected by the onset of the pandemic. We examine its long-term impact on career prospects and ask whether educational institutions and the industry have done enough to support the ‘Covid generation’

For young talent who were just starting out in the creative sector when the pandemic hit, it’s hard to quantify just how much of a knock-on effect it has had on their careers. Even in the process of finding people to speak to for this piece, the industry press was inundated with stories of those on the clinically extremely vulnerable list who spent most of their time at university shielding, or had to submit their final degree projects via WeTransfer. Others lost all their freelance work and had to go back to stacking shelves at Tesco, or landed their dream job after a year of precarious placement rounds, only to be made redundant.

While no two experiences of the pandemic have been the same, the clear thread that runs through the so-called “Covid generation” is their collective sense of resilience. Lily le Moine, one half of creative duo Quiet Storm lilandsho, was in her first year of her creative advertising degree when universities in the UK began closing campuses and cancelling graduate shows. “We went from being in the studio several times a week in person for classes and collaborations, to everything being completely online. I was on residency at the time, so I chose to go up north and be with my family during lockdown and slept on the sofa for a few months,” she says.

Now a visual designer at R/GA Sydney, Kelly Phan was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design in the US during Covid. While many of her fellow international students decided to fly home or take a gap year, she chose to spend the remainder of her second year in Providence. “I went from attending in-person classes, creating physical installations, printing books, and pinning final projects on the classroom walls, where we could wander around, admire, and critique each other’s work, to managing delayed Zoom screen shares and seeing gray “off-screen” profiles of people eating breakfast in their pajamas. I don’t think anyone was prepared for that,” she says.