The big Working From Home (WFH) experiment has shown us over the past months that many industry sectors can function perfectly well in the absence of offices. And not only introverts discovered the benefits of not having to go through the commute/dress-up ritual of daily office life.

One thing will fall through the cracks though: coaching of junior people. Our education system produces people that can pass tests, not run companies. New recruits need to look over the shoulder of more experienced people to see how things are done.

When it comes to presentations, anyone can teach herself how to design slides using online resources (and useful tools such as SlideMagic). Learning how to pitch, making a convincing argument, sensing the feel in a room, these are all things that come with experience.

The emerging profession of the highly skilled, highly paid, independent freelancer (I was one of those for more than a decade), consists mainly of people who learned how to do things in a regular company setting, and then broke free. Doing this straight out of school is not possible for most people. You lack the skills, and the credibility to become a service provider.

A good example might be my venture into coding apps. I really understand the target market and the need, the Internet and a 1992 engineering degree taught me how to code, and the result is a usable software product. While I probably could run SlideMagic as it gets bigger, I might not be the person who can run a 200 person strong software engineering team, since I have never been one of these 200 programmers in the trenches working together to manage a very large system.

Photo by Célio Pires on Unsplash