The job titles have barely changed. What sits inside them has changed almost entirely.

Ask a design director what they needed from a junior hire five years ago and the answer would have been fluent sketching, a good eye, and the patience to sit through fittings. Ask the same question now and sketching is assumed — the conversation moves quickly to material sourcing, to whether the candidate can read a supplier's compliance documentation, to how they handle digital tooling without letting it flatten their own voice.

That shift is showing up clearly in the briefs we receive. Below are the capabilities employers on our register keep returning to, and what they mean in practice.

Material fluency is becoming a baseline

Designers are increasingly expected to understand what a fabric costs the planet as well as what it costs per metre. That means recognising the difference between a recycled-content claim and a certified one, knowing which finishes complicate end-of-life recycling, and being able to hold a conversation with a mill about minimum order quantities without needing a translator.

This is not a sustainability specialism. It is turning into general design literacy, in the same way that understanding grading or tech packs became general design literacy a generation ago.

Supply chain roles are moving upstream

Historically, supply chain hiring in fashion concentrated on logistics — getting product from where it was made to where it sells. The roles we are asked to fill now start much earlier: supplier mapping, tier-two and tier-three visibility, and the unglamorous work of verifying that a factory list is accurate rather than aspirational.

Incoming due diligence legislation across the EU and UK has made this commercially urgent rather than reputationally nice. Employers are hiring for it accordingly, and salaries in this area have moved faster than in most other functions we track.

Data skills, but applied narrowly

There is a persistent myth that fashion businesses want data scientists. Mostly they do not. What they want is a merchandiser who can interrogate a sell-through report properly, a marketer who can distinguish a genuine signal from a seasonal artefact, and a buyer who does not need to wait three days for someone else to pull a number.

The premium sits with people who combine domain judgement with enough analytical confidence to test their own instincts. Pure technical skill without commercial context is far less useful in this industry than in most.

Communication as a governance skill

As reporting obligations grow, more people find themselves writing things that will be read by regulators, auditors and journalists. Being able to describe what a business actually does — precisely, without overclaiming — has become a genuine hiring criterion, particularly in sustainability and communications roles.

Vagueness used to be safe. It now carries legal risk. The people who can write clearly about complicated, imperfect operations are unusually valuable.

What this means if you are job hunting

  • Name the specifics. "Interested in sustainability" tells an employer nothing. "Worked on the supplier questionnaire for our AW25 knitwear programme" tells them a great deal.
  • Show the reasoning, not just the outcome. Employers are increasingly interviewing for judgement, and judgement is only visible when you explain why you chose one route over another.
  • Do not over-index on tools. Software changes. The underlying skill — understanding cost, material, and consequence — does not.
  • Be honest about what you have not done. The organisations worth working for are wary of candidates who claim expertise across every area at once.

None of this makes the craft less important. Collections still need to be beautiful, and product still needs to sell. What has changed is that the surrounding competence — where the material came from, what it cost to make, and whether the story told about it is true — is no longer somebody else's job.