The credential conversation nobody wins.
At some point in most creative careers, the question comes up. Where did you study? Which school? Which programme? And if your honest answer is "YouTube, trial and error, and a lot of late nights," you learn very quickly how some rooms respond to that. I listed it plainly on my CV: Design School - YouTube and Self-Taught, 2012 to present. Not as a joke. As a fact. Because pretending that my craft came from somewhere it didn't would be dishonest, and dishonesty in how you present yourself has a way of catching up with you. The truth is I've been learning design since 2012, the same year I started my formal IT qualification. The two ran parallel. One was institutional. The other was relentless and personal and never really stopped.
What self-teaching actually looks like.
People romanticise it. "Oh you're self-taught, that's amazing." And then they imagine someone who stumbled naturally into genius, effortlessly picking things up along the way. That's not what it looks like. It looks like watching the same After Effects tutorial four times because you missed something the first three. It looks like finishing a client project, looking at it, knowing it's not good enough, and spending the weekend figuring out why. It looks like opening someone else's file and feeling genuinely humbled by the gap between where you are and where you want to be. I opened an Nvidia marketing assets folder from one of our clients once and felt immediately inferior. That feeling wasn't discouraging. It was clarifying. Self-teaching is just learning without a syllabus. The syllabus becomes your own curiosity, your own dissatisfaction with your current level, and your own ability to find the right resources at the right time.
The advantage nobody mentions.
Here's what formal education gives you: structure, community, a foundation, and a credential. All valuable. None of it is something to dismiss. But here's what it doesn't always give you: the habit of learning independently on demand. That habit is what self-taught people build by necessity. And in a field like design, where the tools change constantly, new disciplines emerge regularly, and the market shifts underneath you while you're working, the ability to pick up something new and get functional fast is worth more than any single skill you already have. I didn't plan to learn Blender. I came across work that required a level of 3D I couldn't achieve any other way, and I decided the same day that I was going all in. That decision-making speed, that willingness to just start, that's a muscle. And it only exists if you've been exercising it your whole career.
When formal and self-taught meet.
I want to be clear: I'm not making an argument against formal education. I have a National Certificate in Information Technology from Masvingo Polytechnic College, and the foundations I built there matter. Structure matters. Being taught by someone who has already made the mistakes matters. The point isn't that one path is better. The point is that the self-taught designer who treats their own growth as a lifelong curriculum is not behind. They are, in most cases, ahead on adaptability, which is the metric that actually matters over a ten-year career. With respect to degree and context, skill is what gets recognised internationally. Not where you learned it. Not what the certificate says. The work speaks, and the work is built from everything you absorbed, regardless of where you absorbed it.
What I'd tell a young designer starting out.
Learn everything. Seriously. Not just the thing you think you're good at. Learn the adjacent skills. Learn the tools that scare you. Learn the disciplines that seem unrelated to your lane because they never actually are. And when you hit a ceiling, which you will, don't wait for someone to hand you the next level. Go find it. Watch the tutorial. Reverse engineer the work you admire. Ship something bad so you can make something better. Being self-taught isn't a gap. It's a disposition. And it's one of the best ones you can carry into a long creative career.