It’s common that even as I act as a freelancer before hiring independent of my previous work samples, companies or photographers don’t jump and hire you. Especially photographers when they try to recruit you one of the questions I get from time to time is “where did you learn retouching from and how do you improve your skills?” at first these questions were a bit strange for me, I was thinking at the time “why do they care? If my work is good enough for their project, why do they care where I got it.”