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Dr. Grier blogs about Narcissism and other current topics.>
Part Five -- Experience
December 13, 2009
When someone tells me they have twenty years of experience on the job,” a colleague of mine used to say, “what it usually means is that they have one year of experience they have been using for twenty years.”
Time used to be synonymous with experience. And experience implied competence.
But not anymore. Time spent on the job is no longer enough. We can no longer assume that someone who is "experienced" is competent.
Many job requisitions include something like this in their descriptions: advanced degree in a related discipline or bachelors degree with five years experience.
This is an acknowledgement that education can make up for a lack of experience.
It is also believed that advanced education gives people more knowledge, broader exposure to the latest methods and techniques in applying that knowledge, and perhaps even more importantly implies that a person thinks at a “higher” level because of his education.
Let me offer a metaphor for what I mean when I suggest that an advanced education helps people think at a higher level.
I flew jets in the Air Force.
When you begin Air Force flight training, you are taught to fly in planes that are relatively slow. You are not thrown into a supersonic jet fighter your first time out. The reason is that a student has to master the aerodynamics of flying before trying to master the complexity of faster and larger aircraft equipped with sophisticated avionics. To tie the metaphor to our discussion, mastering the basics would be like getting a bachelors degree.
Critical to advancement is the requirement for jet pilots to “accelerate” their thinking. The first propeller plane that I flew had a top speed of 120 knots and a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet. The first jet that I flew averaged 220 knots up to 25,000 feet. The second one cruised at 40,000 feet close to the speed of sound and jetted around the airport at 270 knots. If your thinking could not “keep up” with the speed, you could not fly the airplane. Or graduate from pilot training.
So just like learning to fly jets accelerates a pilot’s thinking, advanced education in a similar way teaches you to think at a higher level.
The tradeoff between education and experience suggests that we already consider certain characteristics other than experience critical for success.
But let me also make the point that I am not discounting experience. Experience implies an applicant has seen a greater variety of situations and therefore has the knowledge and ability to better navigate the unexpected to get the job done. Smart people with experience can extrapolate that experience and apply what they have done in one situation to another that is similar.
But neither experience nor education implies competence. Neither captures how a person “fits” into the office.
In my book Narcissism in the Workplace, my coworker Ken had all the experience and education that one could hope for a new employee. An impressive résumé that suggested he had “done it all” and was primed to do even greater things. His qualifications and the descriptions of his management experience exuded competence to do the job.
But in retrospect, what was missing from Ken’s résumé was an indication of Ken’s competence to fit into a new workplace where teamwork was critical. To be able to abandon legacy thinking when faced with new challenges. Where the ability to network was more important than merely telling people what to do. Where the “force” of one’s personality and the power of one’s ideas were more important than the authority ascribed to one’s position.
The truth was that Ken had to think differently if he was to be successful in our organization. Despite his experience, he could not.
He had to “accelerate” his thinking if he was to master the technology and skills to succeed in our office. Despite his advanced education, he was unwilling and perhaps even unable to do so.
Simply put, Ken lacked the competence to perform in our organization. The result was disaster.
Experience and competence are no longer synonymous.
Competence today is as much about being a productive and constructive member of the organization as it is about the length of one's employment.
If this is true, our challenge is to separate competence from "experience" when we do our interviews.
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