Yes, spending more time in the office can help accelerate your career. Especially at the beginning, when you're not just doing a job; you're learning how to do it, how the business works, how decisions get made and how to become the sort of person who's trusted with bigger projects and greater responsibility.
Early in your career, proximity to talented people is a massive opportunity. Make the most of it. Be curious. Ask questions. Join the conversation. Volunteer for the project. Learn from the people whose jobs you might want one day.
Being physically present makes it easier to learn from people who are already good at what they do. Watch how experienced colleagues handle difficult conversations, navigate competing priorities, present ideas and solve real-world problems. Observe how decisions are made and how people respond when things don't go to plan.
You don't have to camp on your boss's desk! Just be present, pay attention and take an interest in what's happening around you. You can learn an enormous amount from the everyday moments that never make it into a training manual.
Marketing thrives on ideas, and ideas get better when they're shared. Bouncing thoughts off colleagues, exploring different perspectives, asking questions nobody had considered and challenging each other's thinking can turn a good idea into a great one.
Ideas don't just happen in meetings; they happen in the moments between them. A conversation that takes five minutes in person can take days of messages to replicate — if it happens at all!
The value is in the back-and-forth: testing an idea, challenging an assumption, exploring alternatives and refining your thinking in real time. For someone early in their career, these exchanges are an opportunity not just to improve the work, but to learn how experienced marketers think.
Your career isn't just built on what you know. It's built on who knows you, who trusts you and what people say about working with you.
Every interaction is an opportunity to build that reputation. Working across functions, solving problems in the moment, understanding different perspectives and getting feedback before you head too far down the wrong path all shape how people see you - not just as a marketer, but as a colleague, a collaborator and a future leader.
It's how you build trust beyond your immediate team. It's how you become the person others turn to when they need someone who can join the dots, bring people together and make things happen. Over time, those relationships and that credibility can help open doors to the progression you crave.
Your reputation isn't built in isolation. It's built in the moments when people see how you think, how you work, how you respond to a challenge and how you make things better for everyone around you.
You can be brilliant at your job, but if the people making decisions rarely see you, hear your ideas or experience what it's like to work with you, they may not fully appreciate what you can offer.
Being in the office gives people more opportunities to discover your strengths, see your initiative and recognise your potential. It can help you become a familiar, trusted colleague - someone who's remembered when an exciting project comes along or a new opportunity opens up.
This isn't about being seen sitting at a desk. It's about being seen contributing, learning, connecting and making a difference.
The Institute of Student Employers reports that 65% of early-career learning takes place face-to-face. Meanwhile, research published in Nature Human Behaviour, examining collaboration among 61,182 Microsoft employees, found that widespread remote working made collaboration networks more siloed and reduced connections between different groups.
These findings don't mean that remote working can't work, or that everyone needs to be in the office five days a week. They do, however, highlight the importance of face-to-face learning, informal knowledge-sharing and the relationships that help people develop professionally.
For someone at the beginning of their career, these aren't trivial extras. They're opportunities to build skills, confidence, judgement and connections that can pay dividends for years to come.
Read the Institute of Student Employers' findings
Of course, you can work effectively from almost anywhere, and flexibility has real value. But it's worth asking yourself an important question: are you optimising for today's convenience, or investing in the professional you want to become?
Your early career is a time to learn as much as you can, build your network, develop your judgement and discover what great work looks like. Spending meaningful time around talented, experienced colleagues can help you do all of those things.
You can work from almost anywhere. But don't miss out on the experience, relationships and learning that can help you get where you want to go.
Show up. Get involved. Build relationships. Make yourself known. Your future self may thank you for it.
