Hmmm....I seem to have given 'Oldfella' a bum steer. Ten years an airman in one Royal Air Force would be a long time without promotion, but I served as an airman in two! Going from airman to P/o is, believe me, very much a vertical learning curve! As an airman tradesman, you very much tend to do what you were trained to do, not so as a very junior officer, where everyone is looking for a dogsbody, and you learn as you go , and if you don't crash and burn it's something of a tribute to what you may have learned as an airman, coupled with a determination you might not have known you had. By the time you get to Flt Lt, you've learned a lot, and especially you've learned to listen very carefully to your NCOs but to not, necessarily, take all the advice given. In the end, you have to manage them, the job, and everything else, and that, IMHO, is why I felt never being an NCO was beneficial. That is not to say there are some very fine officers who had been NCOs, just some that don't change their ways too much.
Mind you, I had a few junior officers who need some serious directional advice! Particularly Direct Entry types waving brand new MBAs but with absolutely no air force ethos whatsoever.