Guilds
There was a time where the system of skill transferring was such that you would start out as an apprentice to learn the skill imposed upon you. You would be an apprentice to a master and through watching and consuming the information you would slowly learn the basics and the fundamentals and progress to more and more advanced stages until you are self a master taking on an apprentice.
I am not the first one to write about this system and how it can be applied to the modern way of working concerning many different disciplines. The thing is that information now only gets transcribed and you can at will consume it but there is no guidance and no context. Therefore it is harder to know what the right thing is to learn and the risk of a skill dying out is much higher. This loss of information can be quite costly.
I feel we are craftsmen as well, just like back then where you had to learn a skill like blacksmith, barrel-maker or shipwright, now you can learn the skill to be a designer, front end coder or DevOps engineer. The same structure can apply and you have apprentices, journeymen, masters and therefor also guilds. Guilds are the union of all of the same type, so a guild for the blacksmiths. That means the guild can set up rules and regulations on what should be the best practice and also share information on new processes and what works the best. If everyone can be better that means everyone will benefit.
In the modern world it would mean no skill dies out completely and you always have successors. For example core development teams, that are responsible for things like the Python core or Django Core, are now facing the problem that there is no new blood taking over and it is difficult to understand from scratch what the entire overview is like.
If there would be a simple path from apprentice to master then also it would automatically make it a career path and there is constant feedback on how many of what discipline there are.
We are digital craftsmen and I want to have a guild of sorts, more a collective, that is called Smell the Roses coding. It is purely doing something for the fun of doing it.