# The Portfolio Skills That Still Sell in an AI Market [00:00:00] **Tiana Ned:** I found my old portfolio link from back in 2021, I think, and since I'm rebuilding my site for the whole strategy pivot thing I'm keep thinking about, I'm rebuilding my offers. I wanna create a signature offer and just lead with that. So I was browsing through my older portfolio pieces to figure out if any of those fit into my current offerings, and I was going through this link that I have on Google Sites, and I also opened my folder in my Google Drive trying to figure out what stays in this current portfolio and what should be discarded or removed or if anything at all brings value to my new page. [00:00:49] And I hit this whole stretch of dropshipping ad cuts. There are so many of them. Those 15-second edits I did, I think, in Premiere, maybe some of them even in Filmora, because I remember I was using Filmora heavily back then. And it was mostly for brands that were selling pet accessories. There were some female fashion clothing brands mostly as well. [00:01:19] And yeah, just basic cuts and those stock transitions, text popping up on a beat, things like that. And right next to that folder of social ads, the static Canva posts, and I'm sitting here looking at this, and I find it so cringey now. It... It's n- not bad work. It's really not. Now that I think about, I think these graphics would be relevant even today. [00:01:49] I think it's good design work. But what's so cringey to me from this, uh, point of view and from this standpoint is it looks exactly like every other creative producer's portfolio from that era. You can literally put any freelancer name on that folder, and nobody would able to tell the difference because there's just section of graphics and then section of short videos, then short clips cut from interviews and podcast episodes and whatnot with captions and simple animations on it. [00:02:23] Then there are these Facebook ad videos. And I've been sitting with this drive folder for probably, like, 40 minutes at this point as I'm trying to figure out what earns its spot in my new portfolio page and what just sits here 'cause it's always been there, and I haven't touched it since. So today's episode is gonna be a bit more specific than those "Will AI Take Your Job?" [00:02:51] kinds of episodes because at this point, I think I've done probably four of those So I w- I have a different take on this, and I wanna talk about the specific problem of creative freelancers' portfolios, and what's the actual problem in an example like my portfolio from 2021. Everything in it is execution. [00:03:17] Everything. There's not a single place in my portfolio that's not execution. And as we discussed, execution is the bucket that's getting eaten right now in every single discipline. At this point, it's no matter what you do, whether it's design, video, copywriting, photography, whatever it is. So I wanna talk about the other bucket, which is what is still selling in 2026, discipline by discipline, and roughly where that line sits right now, this year specifically. [00:04:08] Welcome back to AI For Creative Professionals. I'm Tijana, and I've been freelancing since 2018, mostly static graphics, video ads for DTC brands, and most recently, podcast editing, which goes to show that I'm a dabbler in creative disciplines, and my portfolio is a classic combination of unrelated roles I had throughout. [00:04:34] And this one part of the career adaptation thread that's been running through the last few episodes, I don't... Let me see. When did I talk about how to price AI-assisted work? Yeah, I'm gonna link that one in the show notes. But this episode is its sibling. So the question underneath the pricing question is what we're talking about here, 'cause pricing really only works if you know what you're pricing. [00:05:03] And I also did an episode about taste and judgment mattering more than raw execution as AI gets better, and I stand by the general idea. But as I listened to it recently, I thought it was a little vague because there's not a lot in it you can actually point to and go, "Okay, that specific thing is safe, and that specific thing is not safe." [00:05:27] So this time, I went and gathered some data, job posting numbers, freelance rate reports, and people talking about what's happening in their specific corner of this. So I think it's gonna be a bit more useful and a bit uncomfortable in a couple of places, including for me, so fair warning on that. And one thing before we get into this, some of these specific numbers I'm about to say will already be a little out of date by the time you're hearing this. [00:05:59] That's the deal with anything AI and money related right now. It moves super fast. So I'll flag it when a number already shifted once. Okay, so the split What I think explains everything in this episode is that the market broke into two pieces, and only one of those pieces is shrinking. So we're gonna talk about that. [00:06:21] There's this analysis of someone going through about one hundred and eighty million job postings over almost three years, so twenty twenty-three to late twenty twenty-five. And the split in there is honestly a little eerie. So computer graphics and three D and VFX roles down thirty-three percent. Second year in a row that's dropped. [00:06:46] It was twelve percent the year before that. Uh, writer postings down twenty-eight percent, photographer postings down twenty-eight percent as well, journalists down twenty-two percent. In that exact same window, creative director postings, creative manager, creative producer was basically flat. Some of them even grew a little. [00:07:08] It's a completely different graph in the same industry. So what this goes to show is that creative work was split into make the thing and decide what the thing should be, and only the first one is kind of slowly disappearing. As I went through my own invoices for the last twelve months, I asked myself how much of this was the making versus deciding. [00:07:33] And if I'm being honest with you, most of it, if not all of it, was still the making. So there's another number that goes with this. Upwork put out their latest workforce data, and they're saying freelancers doing AI-related work are earning about thirty-four percent more per hour than everyone else on the platform, which sounds great except their own report from last year, I think I mentioned this in some of the previous episodes from last year, they said it was forty-four percent. [00:08:05] So that number already came down once in just a span of a year, which tells you something too, is that any single stat in this space is just a snapshot, okay, of a point in time, and it's moving under us while we're still talking about it. And here's another stat. There are these illustration agencies in London, Central Illustration Agency, Illustration X, and over the last year or so, they've been signing people doing old school hands-on stuff, stuff like Japanese woodblock printmaker, a linocut artist, like physical carving into material illustration. [00:08:43] And the reason from what I can tell is that AI illustration got a nickname. Someone called the default AI look visual elevator music, which once you hear that, you cannot unhear it, right? And the second something generic gets a name, everyone with a pulse starts scrabbling to sound like anything but that Okay, and it's not just with illustration. [00:09:08] Brand strategy work, systems thinking, positioning, all those things, that's something like 26% in demand on Upwork's latest skills report. Art direction shows up as one of the standout paid categories in the UK freelancer survey that came out this year too. So the story's playing out in a few different corners at once. [00:09:30] We have the specific execution skill inside a discipline getting squeezed, and the layer just above it, okay, the layer where someone actually is making a call, is where the money is moving. And to be honest, if I zoom all the way out, uh, it's basically the same exact line running through every discipline I looked at. [00:09:51] In design, it's brand strategy and full identity systems on one side versus logo files and template layouts on the other. In writing, it's persuasion copy, sales pages, funnels, conversion architecture, all of that, and real domain expertise, okay? Versus on the other side, generic blog posts and About Us pages. [00:10:14] In video and motion work, it is storytelling and pacing judgment, so being the person who shapes the story, versus routine edits and template explainers. And in marketing, it's positioning and campaign strategy versus execution of the individual assets underneath it. So as we can see, it's four different disciplines, but exact same thing every single time. [00:10:41] So what that goes to show you that AI is eating making the thing, and the money moved up into deciding what the thing should be, which sounds like good news, right? If you're already up in the decide-a-thing layer. It's a lot more complicated if you're not there yet, and that's where I wanna go next 'cause it's the part of this that worries me a little. [00:11:05] If this was a motivational podcast, I would go and take the floor falling, ceiling raising, go be a decider idea and turn it into a little inspirational arc. Just move up, sell the strategy, don't do the execution work. But a problem with that would be is that the junior execution work, the exact stuff AI is eating first, is also historically how people built the judgment that becomes valuable later, okay? [00:11:38] 'Cause nobody's born knowing what good versus bad versus pretty versus ugly versus coherent versus incoherent looks like. You get it from doing the reps, and years and years of doing the unglamorous reps. And junior level design postings are down somewhat, like 70% roughly from where they peaked a couple of years back. [00:12:01] So if a 22-year-old designer never spends two years doing the boring layout revisions and getting notes about kerning Where does then the judgment come from later? I honestly don't know. And I didn't start this career with strategy work. By the way, I'm not... I'm still not there yet. I started it by three years of simple background loops and ad cuts for brands you've never even heard of and never will, 'cause who knows if they exist anymore. [00:12:30] But the strategy and the judgment part came probably around year four or five, if it showed up at all. I'm still deciding some days if I'm cut out to do that work. I don't know how I would even develop it if AI had existed at that point in time to just do the grunt work back for me in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. [00:12:52] Maybe I would have anyway. I don't know. Maybe I would've skipped the part where you learn anything. But here's the second complication, which is the one that bugs me. The whole taste is the thing that is safe idea that we've been leaning on this whole episode, I am not exactly sure that it's permanent, okay? [00:13:10] So there's an argument going around from people who build this stuff that taste is not some kind of fortress that's uniquely human. It's just the next pattern that hasn't been fully commoditized yet, okay? So same as boilerplate code got commoditized, same as basic layout got commoditized. We are just early on the taste one, okay? [00:13:33] And I don't fully agree with that, but I also don't fully don't agree with that. Like, it's an i- uncomfortable place to leave a thought. But here's also the counterweight, 'cause not all of it's bad news, and it's not just theory. This is happening right now. There's a copywriter, Rob Palmer, he's been doing direct response for, like, forty years. [00:13:53] Wow. Tracked something like half a billion dollar in results, and he talks about this exact pattern playing out in real time. Businesses that fired their copywriters for ChatGPT back in twenty twenty four, by twenty twenty-five a bunch of them were hiring copywriters back at higher rates than before, specifically to go fix the conversion damage the AI copy had caused. [00:14:17] I love hearing about this. So where does that leave me? To be honest, I think that the top of the ladder is safer right now than the bottom is, okay? But it's this year and today, and I'm not sure how people are supposed to get onto the ladder in the first place anymore. Uh, so I don't have a clear answer for that. [00:14:36] I feel kinda lucky that I'm not a junior at this point in time, and I might do a whole separate episode just on this, jumping on the ladder part. That's the part that is not resolvable right now. What I can tell you is what I did this week regarding my portfolio I went through every single client deliverable from the last 12 months and sorted it into two piles. [00:15:03] One was I executed this, and one was I decided this. The test I used was, could this client have gotten, like, 80% of the way there with M- Midjourney, ChatGPT, Runway, or whatever, plus a mediocre freelancer? If yes, that's an execution pile item. It doesn't matter how proud of it I am or how long it took me, so that's the whole Premiere and Canva folder. [00:15:31] Okay, uh, so it's execution pile with no contest. And I'll be straight with you, most of my folder landed in the execution pile. So step two, for the two or three projects that landed in the I decided it pile, I rebuilt the case study around the decision and not around the deliverables. So instead of here are three short clips I made, it was more like, here is what the client struggled with, here's what they originally wanted, and here's what I told them not to do instead, and here is why, and here's what happened afterwards when we did it my way. [00:16:12] Okay, so it's a whole case study story. The finished asset is basically just the footnote. Okay? And then step three on the whole should I show AI in my portfolio question, don't hide that you use the tools. As a matter of fact, everyone already knows you do. Okay? But the point is not, "Hey, look, I know how to use Midjourney." [00:16:34] No. The point is to show what you chose not to automate and being able to talk about that one spot where AI draft was wrong and you're the one who caught it, so that's the signal. And then step four, if you run this audit on your own invoices from the last year and more than half of it comes back as pure execution, go and listen to the pricing episode, which I'm gonna link in the show notes, and listen to it this week because I think that's the thing that changes your income and not just your portfolio page. [00:17:08] Okay, if you want to do this, here's your homework. Go dig up your old folder on your hard drive, Google Drive, wherever you keep your old client stuff. Tell me what you almost deleted and why you didn't. I really wanna know. I'll also drop the newsletter link once it airs if you ever wanna read a longer breakdown of the numbers I mentioned today. [00:17:30] And that's it for this episode. I'm gonna go and feed my cat now before he jumps on the keyboard and stops my recording for me. I will talk to you soon.