Workplace Insights by Adrie van der Luijt
Careers aren’t really ladders, they’re more like messy scribbles with occasional moments of clarity. I’ve spent decades watching talented people waste years chasing what they thought they should want rather than what actually suited them.
The posts in this section reflect what I wish someone had told me thirty years ago: that the most successful careers are built on knowing your strengths, acknowledging your limitations and having the courage to navigate workplace politics without becoming what you despise.
Whether you’re just starting out or questioning decades of choices, you’ll find honest reflections on creating a career that works for you rather than burning yourself out for an organisation that sees you as replaceable.
Discover how strategic timing in content design affects user trust, cognitive load and accessibility. Learn when to slow down interfaces to improve credibility and when urgency messaging backfires.
Examining UK government digital inclusion challenges through GOV.UK One Login and Assist AI. How these initiatives address barriers for vulnerable users and what we can learn from international alternatives.
Skills disruption in the coming years won’t be gentle or fair. Your ability to evolve your capabilities might be the only job security you’ve got.
Virtual assistants marketing themselves as handlers of “tedious tasks” face a reckoning as AI advances. This disconnect reveals a broader failure to recognise how support roles are evolving. As the transactional model becomes obsolete, VAs must reimagine their value beyond task execution to remain relevant in tomorrow’s workplace.
The Public Design Evidence Review sets out to define the future of design in public services, but leaves out the emotional and psychological realities of its users. In a post-lockdown world where cognitive overload is rising and trust is falling, trauma-informed design isn’t a luxury. It’s a baseline.
The COVID-19 Inquiry documented a failure that should embarrass everyone in government digital services: no British Sign Language interpretation at press conferences, no accessible formats for emergency guidance. The Inquiry states plainly: “Everyone should be able to understand the action their government is asking them to take.” So where was GDS? Where were the senior content designers? An insider who worked in the Cabinet Office during COVID exposes what went wrong and asks the uncomfortable question: would a future government just outsource this to AI?
A pragmatic look at absolutist views on AI ethics and why transparency and accountability, not moral panic, should shape content design today.
Explore how mental models in content design must account for vulnerability, trauma and cognitive impairment to create truly accessible services that work for all users, including those in crisis.
AI isn’t coming for copywriters’ jobs in some hypothetical future. The question isn’t whether this change will happen, but what you’ll do now that it has.
The traditional professional development model relied on a progression that now risks disappearing. Without deliberate intervention, we face not just economic disruption for current mid-tier professionals, but potentially an expertise crisis in the coming decades.