Be Grateful Not Greedy: How Creatives Were Trained to Undervalue Their Work

Anyone who has applied for an internship knows that they are highly competitive. Being chosen among hundreds of applicants makes you feel special, and like you’ve achieved something. You feel grateful for the opportunity to work. I remember when I was in design school part of the curriculum was to do an internship at an agency between year 1 and year 2. It was mandatory, we didn’t have a choice.

I understand the value in gaining experience, and I also understand that agencies aren’t going to pay interns the same as they would a full-time employee. The position is about learning, and the people being hired for internships often have no experience or are still in school, like I was.

There is value in learning, and sure you can even make an argument that the opportunity to work at a prestigous agency might be worth working for free. But the work I was doing at my internship wasn’t “intern” work. I remember one of my tasks was removing the background from over a hundred company logos and saving them as .pngs. Yes there is a stereotype about interns doing the grunt work, but all that means is that internships aren’t really about teaching. I knew back then that something felt off about the position, but at the time I didn’t have the words to articulate what that was.

My internship was full-time, and I was doing the work of an employee. I know now that what was really going on was the agency was saving thousands on cheap labour for the two months I was there. The deal wasn’t something I should have felt grateful for, I should have been angry about it. But when you don’t know better you trust the people around you that do, and they were all encouraging this path.

What internships teach you aside from what it’s like to work in an agency, is that it is not only okay to work for free, but it is also necessary to get your foot in the door. So if most of us started by working for free and were told to be grateful for it, was that just the beginning of a much bigger problem? And if internships really teach young creatives valuable skills why do they have such a negative impact on our perception of value when it comes to our work.

Internships: The First Lesson in Devaluation

Internships are common in many industries like fashion, media and politics, and unpaid internships (while not exclusive to) are heavily concentrated in the creative industry. The implicit lesson we learn at the entrypoint to our career is that our skills are worth less than the opportunity to use them. And most of us accepted this as fact, I know I did. I never questioned whether or not it made sense to work for free, because everyone around me did it. It was almost unheard of to land a design job without doing an internship first. Even the teachers at my school told me I had to do it to get a job, to build my portfolio and to have something on my CV.

While the entry into a design career may be difficult or even impossible without an internship, the data shows that those who take on unpaid internships in creative industries earn on average less than people who don’t.

“Those who work for free to get on the career ladder are more likely to earn £4,000 less in salary than non-interns.” – University of Sussex

So if internships don’t actually lead to better opportunities and earning potential why do we do them at all? The answer is painfully obvious. It’s about exploiting people who don’t know better.

Back when I was in school we believed an internship would automatically lead to a paid position, but that was never a promise that was made. The deal was always a maximum of 6 months sometimes a year if you were “lucky”, and after that the agency would just move on to the next intern. They weren’t interested in teaching with the intention to hire. Interns were replaceable, and in some cases they even made that clear in the way they treated you. Indirectly I was very much aware that my work wasn’t valuable since I was only given tasks that anyone could do.

Young designers rarely have a choice if their dream is to work in an agency. They are expected to do internships, because no agency is hiring someone with zero experience. Most of my peers had to do multiple internships after finishing school before landing a paid full-time position. And in a lot of cases they were excited about getting the chance to work at one of their dream agencies, not because anyone wants to work for free but because we were taught to be grateful. We were taught to value the opportunity over our time.

Gratitude as a Conditioning Tool

Internships deeply affect our understanding of worth when it comes to our work. Unpaid work “perpetuates the idea that new professionals should be grateful for the opportunity to work, regardless of the compensation” (NCDA)

The “be grateful for the opportunity” framing is not isolated to the intership experience, it follow us into freelancing. Budget talks are uncomfortable, because we are taught working for free is okay and expected. Our teachers and agency leaders we look up to tell us that we shouldn’t expect to be paid. No one tells us our work is valuable. So when a client questions our prices we end up negotiating ourselves down, we cave on price and we apoligse for our rates.

And when we do ask for fair pay we are considered entitled. Our prices are framed as outrageous and attempts are made to “buy” our work in exchange for exposure or future opportunities neither of which are guaranteed nor pay the bills. But we aren’t entitled, quite the opposite actually. We are grateful and even surprised when clients pay us what we ask. Because we have been trained by a system that teaches us to expect nothing except opportunity in exchange for our labor.

There is an expectation that creatives are passionate about what they do and this somehow negates our need to by compensated with actual money. Sometimes our work is even framed as a hobby, even though we are delivering professional level output and results. The moment you register your business it is no longer a hobby, it requires stable income to survive, something that is impossible to grasp for many clients.

On the one hand we are entitled for wanting to be paid and on the other we are also supposed to be so passionate about what we do to the point that we don’t expect any money for it at all. Apparently being excited about our work and still wanting to make a living wage cannot coexist.

The market is saturated with clients that don’t value our work and on some level we agree with them because we were taught very early on that this is normal. We allow clients to dictate prices instead of telling them what the price is and standing behind it. It is impossible for us as a community to price consistently, because we have so many peers doing the work for free. What this has led to is pricing insecurity across an entire industry.

It’s a Structural Problem

I think you would have a hard time finding a creative that has always felt confident in their pricing. Many creatives report feeling underpaid relative to the skill and time their work requires. Undervaluing our work isn’t something that is a personal choice or failure, it was taught.

The industry modelled it by creating an entry barrier that requires free work. The clients reinforce this model and we let them because we are conditioned to. We live in a time where our work is devalued from all angles, and no one gave us a framework to work against it.

The “just charge what you are worth” advice is not helpful, because we don’t have an understanding of what that worth should be. It also isn’t enough to talk about value without addressing how we lost sight of what’s valuable to begin with.

AI is only going to make this problem worse for creatives. It gives clients even more ammo in an argument about why the price is so high. Now they can throw “but an AI can do this in minutes why do you need hours” at us. But if anything AI is only making it more obvious what our value really is, and it is essential that we understand it and are able to communicate it effectively.

Our value, as interns for an agency, was about being a cheap labor force. They weren’t interested in our ideas or teaching us about the creative process, they gave us work anyone can do. We are only valuable to clients if we can do our work fast and as cheap as possible otherwise they might as well just do it themselves with AI. The message is that we are replaceable, but we aren’t (trust me). If that were true designers never would have existed to begin with. AI only threatens to replace the execution. An agency might replace you, but unless you are in a strategic position they too are replacing someone for the execution

Our value was never and will never be about the final product. Yes we create logos, websites, branding, and yes AI claims to do all that. What people forget about is the process, the experience, the relationships and the expertise required to get to the final results. AI cannot replace those things, and if it could we would have been replaced long ago by platforms like Fiverr and Freelancer.com that also offer final output only.

The problem was never that our work actually lacks value, even if that’s what we are taught early on. What happened is that we were taught to be grateful for any and all opportunity instead of given the tools to understand, articulate and price value.

The Shift Isn’t in Mindset

Pricing based on value and not vibes requires structure. Developing a structure is possible with a deep understanding of process, and yes this comes from experience. You might still be in your undercharging era, and that’s ok. No one ever taught us what to charge, and no one wants to pay for design which makes it hard to price appropriately even if you know what you are doing.

However, knowing your numbers changes the conversation. It means you’re treating your work as a business and therefore not something you can give away for free, and it makes it impossible to ignore your financial reality. So when a client comes to you and expects anything below what you know to be the minimum rate in order for you to make a profit you have the confidence to turn them away. You turn the conversation around so that you dictate what something costs and not the client.

Pricing with intention isn’t something that is optional. It is the solution to years of being trained to undercharge. A good pricing strategy isn’t about convincing a client who doesn’t want to pay for creative work to pay you, it’s about pricing appropriately based on your business and your context. Attracting the right clients is key, but confidence through understanding value will already deter those who don’t value your work.

Faktor is designed to generate value-based prices and give you a structured starting point. But a calculator alone can't fill the knowledge gap. Understanding the value of creative work is something we have to build together as a community. It is important that we work towards a new standard when it comes to pricing so that the bar isn’t the unpaid internship.

Further reading:

One of the places that confidence becomes visible to your client is through your proposal. A proposal is a great opportunity to showcase your experience and expertise. If you want a practical guide on how to create a successful proposal check out our blog post on proposal writing.