Practical advice for junior strategists

Between redundancies, budget cuts, and the opportunities and threats of AI behind a lot of it all, junior strategists are having a pretty fucked up time.

And every now and then, people ask me for advice or perspective on how to get into the market, or how to keep evolving your role once you're in.

I help where I can, but also don't always have time for everyone, so I thought I'd document here some of the words of advice I usually give.

If you're struggling to find clarity in the chaos that is the 2025 job market in the creative industries, I hope you'll find something useful below.

It's written from the perspective of a brand and comms strategist, but hopefully some of these points apply to broader contexts as well.

Think of it not as a menu of all the things you should do, but rather as a buffet of some of the things you can start doing in the next few days.

As I come up with more things, I will keep updating the list here.

Turn stuff into stories

AI can know a lot of stuff, but it's not always good at telling and selling a story about what that stuff means. Practise turning information into a narrative people can get behind. It will do you wonders in interviews, client work, or even trying to share some of your thinking publicly.

Read widely and weirdly

Sure, you can digest all the sources everyone else does, but you know what's even better? Consuming things others don't, as they tend to marinate and mutate into points of view others may not have. Your perspective is your superpower, cultivate it with a range of seeds.

One point per slide

If you're preparing a presentation, make sure you always have one point per slide. The amount of stuff people pack into slides, even people who are not juniors, is pretty insane. Consumers are cognitive misers, but I'd argue so are company people. Make your thinking as easy to get as possible.

Play back to others

I fundamentally hate the myth that we need to have all the answers, and this creates a lot of guilt and impostor syndrome unnecessarily. Instead, I'd argue strategists first and foremost are really good at playing things back to others. This is how you clarify what people meant, and trust me it will make you look both empathetic and somewhat authoritative along the way.

Practise framing

The same point can be framed in different ways, especially when you deal with different types of colleagues and bosses. Understand who you're speaking to before framing your thinking in a way that makes it most buyable by that person. Reality check: buyability is as important as truth.

Speak in ‘because’s and ‘by’s

Things like 'insight' and 'strategy' are loaded terms, but one practical way of writing them is to think in terms of 'because' and 'by'. Saying something is happening is an observation. Saying it's happening 'because' of another thing gets you closer to an insight. Similarly, saying you want to achieve something is an objective. But saying you want to achieve something 'by' doing something else gets you closer to a strategy. On which note...

Reverse engineer

Another useful way to practise your critical thinking skills is to take the work you like, and reverse engineer your way into what the brief might have been. A comms example: if you look at a poster, write what would have been the Get/Who/To/By brief to get to it. The key elements to train are 'Who' (the consumer problem) and 'By' (the strategic angle), as the other stuff typically is pre-determined in most decent briefs you'll get.

Nail your exec summary

If you're writing a presentation and feeling stuck in the weeds of the detail, take a breather and write in one slide what is your 5-point exec summary. This forces your mind to prioritise and think in narratives, and it's also good practice for ensuring your thinking can live on someone else's deck.

Go deep in plain English

It's tempting to think in jargony words, but what you want is to have a deep enough point that is explainable in plain English. In time, this industry will morph your brain to thinking more in industry terms, but the more you can preserve your ability to explain complex things in terms your mother, father or weird friend from high school would get, the better.

Talk it out

Just because a lot of our output is presentations and documents, practise talking your argument out loud. This can happen by yourself or with others. If by yourself, a trick I like is to record yourself saying your argument and then listening back to see what works and what doesn't. If with others, just find a strategy buddy to talk shit out. It really helps.

Make boring stuff interesting

It's pretty expected that most people will want to work on the exciting briefs and brands, but actually there's a far greater market opportunity for people who can make boring categories feel pretty interesting. Find something others might find boring but you don't, and explore ways in which you can get really good at making that boring stuff feel fresh.

Own the problem

One point of tension I always notice whenever speaking with juniors, especially if they are working in a place like an advertising agency, is that they feel the pressure to have all the answers. But here's the thing, your job isn't to come up with the idea, it's to identify the problem the idea is meant to solve. If you keep going back to that, you're adding value.

Cross disciplines

Another thing I increasingly find interesting is taking disparate areas of interest or expertise and meshing them together into something that is not as easily found. Just recently I spoke with someone trying to get into strategy who had worked as a professional athlete and studied sociology. One starter for ten would be that he could position himself as someone who lives and breathes the sociology of modern sports culture.

Feel it in your bones

One of the value adds you can bring is your ability (if nothing else because you might have more time and energy) to immerse yourself in things that your bosses and clients frankly don't have time to. If you're working with a financial services brand, go people watch around bank branches, or ask your family members about how they decided on their home insurance. This will mean you not only know things, but you can feel them too.

Show your media diet

Chances are, your cultural points of reference are way beyond my wildest imagination. So whenever you worry that you don't have enough experience or insider knowledge to offer a point of view, consider that your wildly different media diet is how you bring an outsider perspective instead. Help keep your bosses and clients current, show your media diet.

Generate momentum

I see your fear of saying the wrong thing, and I'm here to tell you it's absolutely ok to say the wrong thing as long as it sparks a slightly less wrong thing. The strategic and creative process is iterative, and it's quite rare that someone nails an argument from day one. It's far more important to bring enough questions and stimulus to keep everyone else going too.

Decisions or debate

It's quite hard to feel you have agency on the strategic processes of a team or agency, but a useful way to determine this is to either help spark a decision or a debate. If you have some sense of the options you can work with, then your job is to help turn unclear situations into situations where you know what you need to decide to move forward. If all else fails, though, just frame your work as topics for a debate that you can facilitate.

Demonstrate change

People ask me a lot about strategy portfolios, and while in some sense they're harder to write than creative portfolios, they can also be easier. Don't think of it as needing to show how your work links nicely to a final end product, but do think about how your contribution led to some form of change. Sometimes this is as simple as knowing your initial cultural research helped spawn a new research hypothesis that otherwise might not have been there. Explain your specific contributions to the wider project.

Ask without judgement

Your job is to ask questions, so the more you practise asking them the better. There's a dual benefit to knowing how to ask questions without loading them with judgement: one, you understand something better. Two, you help others clarify their own thinking. Never assume someone knows exactly what they mean, and never be afraid to ask stuff like "say more?".

Find a mentor

This doesn't even need to be a formal thing, but rather having a network of people with whom you can speak whenever you need advice. In fact, consider having a portfolio of mentors who can give you perspectives from different vantage points. This is how you keep triangulating your way between where you're at now and what else you can do next.

Know how to find out

Another myth is that our job is to simply know things. No it isn't, our job instead is to know how to find out about things. This ties back to reading widely and weirdly, where the point is not so much that you read and consume everything, but to have a wide range of sources you can consult. And then consulting them as and when necessary for a specific job.

Study the fundamentals

Another thing people always ask is for ways to learn more about the job. Formal education aside, here are some resources that help me on the regular, in sets of three so it's digestible. Podcasts: Call To Action, Uncensored CMO, Marketing Meetup. People: Andrew Tindall, Pollyanna Ward, Alex M H Smith. Books: 98% Pure Potato, How Not To Plan, Run With Foxes. Newsletters: Stratscraps, Famous Campaigns, Storythings. Look 'em up. But needless to say, consume wayyyy beyond strategy stuff.

Have a brag book

It's inevitable to feel a bit anxious as you're getting on your feet about this whole thing, so take note of the good feedback you get, by whom, and about what. This will help you talk about your contribution with others, but also feel good about yourself when there's tougher moments too.

Keep a swipe file

You want to have a library of stuff that you really like, or evidence that you want to keep referring back to. It will make you more efficient, but also give you the muscle memory to cultivate your own taste. You may want to consider ​accessing my swipe file​, if you can afford it. If you can't afford it, email me at rob@salmonlabs.co and we can work something out.