- December 27th, 2010
- 22 Comments »
- Management
Experience is overrated
Experience is only a chance to learn. It does not guarantee any lessons or skills. A resume for someone who worked at a company for ten years, even a fancy one, ensures only that they learned how not to get fired. Maybe they slept with the boss, or were the low performer others kept around so they’d look good. The quantity of their experience alone promises nothing.
We make decisions about people based on our positive assumptions about their experience, denying our knowledge of experienced people in our lives who suck at what they do, despite how long they’ve done it. The experience of a proud parent with 5 adult children means little if they’re all in prison and hate their Mom and Dad. A VP at a Fortune 500 corporation whose division succeeded in spite of their incompetence, has a deceptive track record that does not tell you the important parts of the story.
Many on this planet go through life being mediocre at most things they do – it’s not a shortage of experience that’s the problem. Sometimes someone who is smart, honest and motivated but has no experience at all, will perform better than someone with a superficially impressive career we can only judge from the most biased source possible: their own opinion.
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22 thoughts on “Experience is overrated”
I hear what you are saying but isn’t this why you have interviews and check references? As soon as you talk to someone that has only done mediocre through their life you can tell. Experience is not overrated it is overused as an excuse to not research the person or to say ‘well they had so much experience’ when the person falls on their face.
BTW One persons opinion does not always make a decision.
Kimba: Sure, but very few people check references. And interviews are the candidate talking about topics they are biased about – themselves. It’s very difficult to ascertain, through a conversation, if someone is proficient at what they do or not.
This may be domain specific. 15 years at an aerospace and defense firm, working a variety of programs is the minimal experience to be a program manager. The resume assessment in this domain looks at what programs have been worked and what roles were performed on these programs.
15 years managing large construction projects has a similar assessment process. 15 years writing code for the same product may not – has you suggest. But 15 years running payroll at the 1,000 person firm may be the same as 5 years if nothing has changed.
A hiring manager needs to find the clues hidden inside someone’s “experience” that indicate that their actions and decisions were the cause of (or at least related to) positive outcomes.
Richard: Agreed – but how do you do that? I think interviews are a very difficult way to acertain that.
See The Winchester Interview theory
Must not forget that experience was an OPPORTUNITY to learn. Not all will avail themselves of it, but don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
Payson: agreed. It’s overrated, not useless.
“Experience isn’t what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” – Epictetus
To oversimplify, if you didn’t learn from it.. how much of an experience was it? (At least figure out why you didn’t learn…)
What’s the old joke? “Do you have 20 years’ experience, or one year’s experience 20X?” ;)
This relates directly to your old post on experts! Cognitively, experts structure their knowledge differently than novices. (Typically, they also know more, but the striking differences tend to be in knowledge structure.)
How do they get there? One way is that critical developmental experiences change deep beliefs/assumptions which in turn affect maps, scripts, etc. [nerd speak/off]
Check out the Dunning-Kruger effect [alas, no relation] where experts know a lot more of what they don’t know – they are far better at calibrating their expert-ness than novice who do a remarkable job of over-estimating what they know. LOL, but….
p.s. Fortunately, I seem to be surrounded by people who will cheerfully tell me when I’ve, um, calibrated poorly… ;)
I’m with Scott on the fallibility of interviews. It’s an imperfect science, at best. I used to do behavioral-based interviews when I worked in HR years ago and, while better than the hypothetical questions, were still hardly guarantees for success.
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We tend to overestimate what we think that we know and to understimate what we don’t know. We generally have a stronger oppinion about the value of our experience than what its really worth (maybe this is wrong too).
This post is so timely. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes someone an expert.
http://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-an-expert
Is it experience? (But what of those who have plenty of mediocre experience.)
Is it success? (But does this fairly reward risk taking and address the Baseball Hall of Fame problem.)
Is it knowledge? (Can you research your way into expertise in an academic way.)
I wouldn’t discount experience completely but it’s probably the last on my personal list. I’d much rather see a combination of success and knowledge instead of a stack of ‘experience’. Just because you’ve been doing it a long time doesn’t mean you’ve been doing it well or that you’re doing it well NOW.
Experience has it’s merits over no experience but the problem is always what one perceives thyself. The same argument could be said over someone with a Master’s Degree vs no college. The problem comes down to the fact that we value a resume and what is written on it way too much. Professionals should not be evaluated SOLELY on what they can cram onto a single piece of paper. The resume and even (preselected) references tell very little on their experience, their true passions and drive to go the extra mile; stay late, come in on the weekends. A resume will never truly tell you if they can motivate and lead both one’s self and/or a team.
For me connecting with those kind of individuals is much more important than what is on paper. You’re going to find hundreds of people who look great on paper, but you’re only going to find a few that are going to be able to do a lot of work for you and work hard. For filling jobs, this is easier said than done but I strongly believe in the temp-to-hire approach regardless of what’s on a resume. The resume, interview and background check can only tell you so much. You usually know in the first few weeks what that person is capable of and if they are a great match.
It’s the ageless dichotomy of generational value: If you don’t have experience, you think it doesn’t matter. If you have lots of experience, you think it’s all that matters.
Your point is well taken. Experience in of itself does not a wise man make. But without it a man can be knowledgeable, but rarely is he wise.
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Yes I agree I’m eleven and people say i’m to young to do anything especially write a novel.
I’m a young kid and am writing a novel do you have any advice
@Richard Dalton Agree! One technique I use in interviews is to have the candidate express key decision points, how they were made, and what was the accountability/responsibility/contribution of the candidate (and then check those in references).
Also in my experience a great way to tell smart, honest and motivated folks in an interview is they are willing to share what sucked about something, and what went wrong.
Candidates that love the tools/products/teams/etc they work with unconditionally and that don’t use hindsight to figure out what could have been done better tend to elicit in me a feeling that they have a low bar or are not telling the truth.
(I agree with the post for a certain class of occupations, but for others – think surgeon, musician – just raw hours of practice has an impact on performance)
From twitter:
@adeloscampos said: The theater seats can spend many years there and not for that reason they will learn about theater
I’m a teacher and I’ve been teaching for the last 5 years. Does it mean that I teach worse than a colleague with 10, 15 or 20 years of experience? Not necessarily.
Practice is the key, not experience. As Daniel T. Willingham says in his book “Why don’t students like school?”:
“Experience means you are simply engaged in the activity. Practice means you are trying to improve your performance.” (p. 149)
And then he adds:
“[...] teachers improve during their first five years in the field [...] After five years, however, the curve gets flat, and a teacher with twenty years of experience is (on average) no better or worse than a teacher with ten.” (p. 150)
He goes on saying that practice requires two things.
1. Getting feedback from knowledgeable people.
2. Investing time in activities that are not the target task itself but done for the sake of improving that task.
And he wisely suggests to tape your classes and watch the tapes alone as well as with some colleague to get feedback. A short interesting video related to this subject can be found at YouTube:
Jeremy Harmer talks about filming teachers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuG6jUTeQlw
So I really, really agree with your idea that “Experience is overrated” and I would add that “Practice is underrated”.
I agree totally. I can not get a head coaching job because I only played 10 years and coached 3 as an assistant. All they talk about is coach with experience for available jobs and they resigned or were fired from previous opportunity. Are all boards that naive? I guess so. If someone is a winner they usually stay unless it’s a better opportunity