Mentoring Moments: How To Build A Growth Plan For Junior Copywriters This Year
The Copywriter Column #238
Most growth plans for junior copywriters miss the point.
They’re usually built around skill collection. Write more headlines. Learn email. Try landing pages. Rotate through formats and hope something clicks.
That approach isn’t wrong. Reps matter. Exposure matters. But when a junior writer stalls, it’s rarely because they haven’t been exposed to enough things. It’s because they haven’t developed taste yet.
They’re still learning what good looks like, why it works when it works, and how to tell the difference between something that’s technically fine and something that actually lands. Until that judgment starts to form, more tools don’t help. They just create noise.
That’s where mentoring comes in.
Your real role isn’t teaching mechanics. It’s helping someone calibrate judgment over time. And the best growth plans reflect that. They’re less about variety and more about focus. Less about doing everything and more about doing the right thing repeatedly, with feedback that explains the why.
This is also why humans still matter in an AI-heavy workflow. You can automate prompts. You can’t automate perspective.
1. Build the plan around the work they’re already doing
The fastest way to overcomplicate a growth plan is to design it around a hypothetical future role.
Instead, start with what’s actually on their plate right now. The emails they’re writing. The ads they’re touching. The pages they’re already responsible for, even if they’re still junior versions of that work.
When I’m thinking through a plan, I usually start by paying attention to patterns, not gaps on a skills checklist.
Where do they hesitate?
Where do they move too fast?
What feedback do I find myself repeating?
If the same note keeps coming up, that’s not a personal quirk. That’s the work telling you where the leverage is.
At that point, the goal isn’t to broaden their scope. It’s to narrow it. Growth accelerates when you identify the one thing that’s holding everything else back and give it deliberate attention.
2. Pick one creative constraint and let it do the heavy lifting
“Get better at copy” sounds nice, but it doesn’t give anyone something to practice against.
A useful growth plan has a constraint. One clear creative pressure that forces better decisions and makes progress easier to see.
That constraint should be specific enough that every rep can be evaluated through it. Something like tightening language under real word limits. Prioritizing clarity before cleverness. Learning to open without hype or theatrics.
You’re not trying to fix everything at once. You’re choosing the one skill that, if improved, will raise the floor on all the rest.
Once that constraint is set, it becomes the lens for the entire plan. Every assignment, every rewrite, every review passes through it. That shared focus is what turns effort into momentum.
3. Create a repeatable rhythm, not a rigid system
This is where a lot of growth plans start to feel heavy, especially for new mentors.
You don’t need an elaborate structure. You need a rhythm that’s easy to maintain and hard to ignore.
In practice, that usually means a mix of real work and intentional reps. Rewriting something that already exists. Practicing the focus skill in isolation. Reviewing live assignments through the same lens, week after week.
The specifics can change based on the role and the workload. What matters is that the reps are frequent enough to build pattern recognition and the feedback is consistent enough to reinforce judgment.
You’re not trying to manufacture breakthroughs. You’re creating conditions where improvement becomes inevitable.
4. Use AI to increase reps, not to define quality
This is where a lot of mentors feel tension, and understandably so.
AI isn’t there to decide what’s good. It’s there to reduce friction around practice. Think of it as a way to generate raw material, not answers.
You can use it to spin up alternative angles, impose extreme constraints, or create hypothetical audiences and objections. All of that makes it easier for a junior writer to get more reps in without waiting on you to generate prompts.
But the thinking still belongs to the writer. And the judgment still belongs to you.
If AI is involved, it should increase the volume of practice, not outsource the evaluation.
5. Keep the feedback human, specific, and opinionated
This part doesn’t scale. And it shouldn’t.
AI can surface options. It can’t teach taste. That still comes from a mentor explaining tradeoffs, pointing out near-misses, and naming why something almost works but doesn’t quite get there.
This is where your experience matters most. Not in providing answers, but in modeling how to see the work clearly.
Don’t delegate the review. That’s the moment where learning actually locks in.
The real gift you’re giving
The best mentors don’t overwhelm juniors with information. They give them focus. They protect time for practice. They offer honest reactions rooted in experience.
Junior writers don’t need more resources.
They need someone paying attention.
AI can help them practice more often.
You help them practice better.
That’s the difference between development and delegation. And it’s why your role still matters, even as the tools keep changing.
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This breakdown on developing taste vs collecting skills is spot on. The constraint-based approach makes so much sense, especially when I've seen talented juniors plateau becuase they're trying to master everything at once. Narrowing focus to one pressure point that lifts all other work is probly the most underrated mentorship move out there.