Free Article By Paul Glen of C2
Consulting
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Experience: Is it really all it's cracked up to
be?
(Originally published in Computerworld USA and IT Business
Canada)
Managers seem to have mixed feelings about experience, but you
wouldn't know it from reading a typical job advertisement.
Most of them read like a laundry list of required educational experience,
managerial experience, specific technical experience, project role experience,
industry experience, business application experience, and on and on and on. This
experience thing must be amazingly powerful. Time served must be a measure of
something really important.
But if experience is at such a premium, why are
there so many articles about how hard it is for older IT workers to find a job?
Wouldn't you think that someone with 35 years in IT would be fighting off
suitors, and fresh graduates would be offering their services free of charge in
order to obtain a dose of this golden elixir?
Why don't recruiters advertise in AARP magazine
rather than throwing parties on Ivy League campuses?
The love-hate relationship managers have with
experience seems to be based on their acceptance of four questionable and
incompatible premises:
1. Experience implies knowledge.
The obvious reason to look for people with
experience is that managers are often risk-averse and believe that hiring
someone with experience is safer than hiring someone without it. If you've done
this exact job three times before, then you must know how to do it by now.
2. Experience implies rigidity.
While managers apparently think that some
experience is a good thing, they also seem to assume that too much of a good
thing is not so good. If you have too much experience with the same role,
technology or type of project, something must be wrong with you. You must be
stuck in your ways; you must have become inflexible.
3. Youth implies creativity.
In many cases, we love to hire young people
precisely because of their lack of experience. They are not set in the old ways
and are free to come up with new ideas and approaches that people with
experience might never consider. They are a breath of fresh air to clean out the
stale, old smell of experience.
4. Youth implies drive.
And finally, we love to hire the young because
they have so much energy and ambition. They are dying to go out and make
something of themselves, to climb mountains and explore new horizons. Experience
hasn't yet taught them about the futilities of work and the frustrations of
life. They are not yet beaten down and resigned.
All of these assumptions presume that
experience is either a great teacher or a cruel one. But the truth is that
experience doesn't assure knowledge or rigidity any more than youth assures
creativity or drive. Passing through school can't guarantee that a student has
learned, only that she has had a chance to do so. Learning is ultimately up to
the student. Similarly, experience implies only that someone has had the
opportunity to learn, not that she has actually learned anything.
My own experience has taught me that most
people don't really absorb the lessons that their experience offers. In one
sense, they haven't so much gained experience as they have had things happen to
them. They become neither knowledgeable nor jaded. They haven't processed the
ideas or compared real-world happenings with their theories of how the world
works. Without this processing, experience isn't really a great teacher or a
cruel one; it's only a way to mark the passage of time.
If you really want to make use of someone's experience, or of
your own, find a way to gauge not how much time has passed, but how much of that
experience has been turned into wisdom.
© Copyright 2008 by Computerworld Inc., One Speen Street, Framingham, MA, 01701. Reprinted by permission of
Computerworld. All Rights Reserved.
