Experience is overrated

Employers don’t look for experience despite what the recruitment advertisements say. That’s the view of Computerworld writer Paul Glen.

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.

He says:

…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?

Glen says;

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 is only a way to mark the passage of time.

So much for information technology.

Publishing runs along different lines to information technology

In my industry, publishing, you learn by dealing with events on the fly as they happen. Eventually you build up a stock of  mental tools that mean you can deal with previously unmet situations. This is called experience and it is valuable, despite what Mr Glen says.

Working on tight deadlines and reacting quick turn-around news stories is different from being an IT specialist.

I suggest experience makes many aspects of work so much easier they fade into the background. This leaves plenty of spare brainpower and energy to deal with the bigger issues. There may not be a perfect correlation between experience and knowledge or wisdom, but there’s certainly a link.