The Hidden Workforce That Built Everything Around You

Look around you.

The building you are sitting in was built by people on a site. The coffee you drank this morning was made by someone clocking in before most people wake up. The package that arrived at your door was driven across the country by someone who has not been home since Tuesday.

The world runs on a workforce most people never think about. And that workforce has been quietly, systematically denied something that the rest of the working world takes for granted.

Guidance. Development. The simple act of someone investing in their growth.

The Forgotten Workforce Is Not a Niche

When people talk about the workforce, they tend to picture offices. Meetings. Laptops. Careers with trajectories and development plans and someone senior who has spotted their potential.

That is not most people’s working life.

Most people work in roles that are essential, physically demanding, and largely invisible to the systems designed to support employee growth. They work in care homes, on shop floors, in warehouses, on delivery routes, in admin offices, in hospitals, in schools. They keep everything running. And they are rarely on any development plan.

This is not a small group. Frontline and non-desk workers make up the majority of the global workforce. Estimates vary but consistently place the figure at over 80% of working people worldwide who do not sit at a desk for the majority of their working day.

Over 80%. And the mentoring gap, the development investment, the personal growth tools — almost all of it was built for the other 20%.

What They Are Missing and Why It Matters

It is tempting to frame this as a fairness argument. And it is fair. But it is also a practical one.

When people have no guidance, no development, no starting point for growth, they do not just stay still. They disengage. They leave. They bring less of themselves to their work because nobody has ever suggested their development matters.

The research on this is consistent. Employees who feel invested in perform better and stay longer. Employees who feel invisible do the opposite. For an economy already dealing with skills shortages, high turnover in frontline roles, and a growing crisis of workplace disengagement, the cost of ignoring this workforce is not just moral. It is measurable.

The Gap the System Created

This did not happen by accident. It happened because development infrastructure, coaching, mentoring, training programmes, leadership schemes, was built by organisations for the people those organisations were most focused on retaining and advancing.

Sales teams generate revenue. Leadership teams make decisions. Graduate schemes feed the pipeline. These groups received investment because the return was visible and direct.

The warehouse worker. The care assistant. The administrator. Their contribution is harder to attribute, harder to quantify, and so harder to justify investing in. The logic was flawed from the start. But it became the norm. And norms are stubborn things.

What Changes When You Give Them a Starting Point

The Ten Mentors mission began with a question asked by someone in an operations team who wanted to know why they did not receive the same development as the sales team.

There was no good answer. There never has been.

What Ten Mentors built is the answer that should have existed already. A starting point for the people the system forgot. Not a corporate programme. Not a leadership track. A box. A book. A journal. Music. Something physical that says your growth matters, your direction matters, and you deserve the same starting point as anyone else.

The hidden workforce built everything around you.

It is time someone built something for them.

Give your team a starting point. Get the Ten Mentors Box or get in touch about bulk orders for your organisation.

Caoimhe Duggan is the founder of Ten Mentors and spent nearly 20 years leading operations across companies in Europe, Asia, and beyond. She served as Head of Operations Asia at Spencer Ogden, where she helped scale the business internationally and it was inside fast-growing companies like this that she watched the same pattern emerge everywhere: mentorship and guidance flowed to the most visible people, while the majority were left to figure things out alone.
Her career began early in workflow automation for law firms and eventually RDJ, where she was already building systems that helped people work better. She later became certified in Learning and Development through Stada in Singapore bringing a formal grounding in how people actually grow, learn, and change to everything she builds at Ten Mentors. That combination of operational scale, systems thinking, and human development became the foundation for Ten Mentors. A practical starting point for the people the traditional mentorship system leaves behind.
Beyond the box, Caoimhe hosts the Ten Mentors Podcast — short, honest conversations designed to close the guidance gap one lesson at a time. She is also the founder of mentoring music — a new category of music she created through Ten Mentors Music. The first platform of its kind, mentoring music uses human-written lyrics built around real mentoring themes, produced through modern AI tools — something Ten Mentors is open about. Music designed to help people think clearer, stay steady, and keep moving when things get hard.
Caoimhe writes about personal growth, mentoring, leadership, and what it actually takes to move forward without a map. She has travelled to over 120 countries, lost two brothers at a young age, and brings the kind of honesty to her writing that only comes from having actually lived through difficult things.
She is based between Ireland and Sweden. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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