On Friday, July 25, Simon Buckingham wrote:
>
> The importance of having experience is touted around so much these days
> that it deserves close consideration amongst the members of this list.
> For
> instance, many graduates cannot get a job for lack of experience, but
> neither can they get experience without prior experience!
Simon,
I am so glad you brought this up. This has been one of my pet peeves
throughout my entire career! I think career experience is like a credit
rating. When you are trying to establish a credit rating as a young
person, it seems nearly impossible. When I started out, you needed two
forms of ID to get a checking account - usually a credit card and a
drivers license, but you need a checking account to be able to get a
credit card. How did you break this vicious cycle? You got someone to take
a chance on you - usually a parent, who was willing to co-sign on either
your credit card or your checking account to get you started. Now that I
have established myself, I get two or three credit card offers a week.
When I needed it - it was very difficult to get. As soon as I had it,
everyone wants to have me (my business). It seems to be the same way with
career experience - when you want to get it, it seems impossible, but once
you have it - everyone wants your talents.
> Increasingly, given the nature of more chaotic unorganized external
> economic environments and the internal downstructured less hierarchical
> internal strcutures, the need for experience is a myth perpetuated by 27
> year olds to keep 27 year olds from getting ahead.
I think it tends to be more a myth perpetuated by the "over 30's" (or
whatever other decade you like) to keep the "under 30's" from overtaking
them. Personally, I had much more enthusiasm and energy ready to invest in
my career and in learning new skills when I was 25 than I do now. If there
had been some one to take a chance on me then, I think I would have been
much further than I am now. At times (when I am in a sufficiently cynical
mood), think that career experience really refers to how "flexible" you
are able to be to all the BS that management can and will dish out. When
you are completely broken and will go along with just about anything, you
have career experience! ;-)
The thing that scares me the most in today's world is the ability on both
the side of the prospective employees and employers to use computers to
apply for jobs and screen applicants for openings. We generate or scan
resumes by the hundreds all in the name of expanded opportunities, and we
end up with hiring decisions that are no better than they were decades
ago. They probably end up being worse, because there are plenty of
people, who have figured out how to manipulate the system. Finally, you
can't separate the wheat from the chaff anymore.......
> How important is it for someone to have experience in a world where
> tomorrow will not be like today? The world has fundamentally changed from
> the old orderly organized world to today's diverse, fast changing
> unorganized world.
>
> How necessary is it for people in fast-moving industries such as
> communications and technologies to have a few years of experience when
> everything has changed in that time: the technology, competition and
> customer applications?
I will share another scary conversation I once had with the executive of
one of the world's largest semi-conductor producers. He had sat down and
figured out that it was cheaper for the company to hire chip designers
straight out of grad school, employ the for four or five years and then
fire them. Why? After four or five years, their salaries had gotten very
high, and, by that time, the new graduate had surpassed their knowledge of
new design rules and fabrication techniques. So much for career experience
working in your favor......
> In today's fast changing world, education is more important than
> experience. It is more difficult to unlearn received wisdom that is no
> longer relevant than to learn new truths. We need to substitute the need
> for experiences with teh need for discoveries because whilst experiences
> look back in time, discoveries evoke future-oriented images.
Agree & Disagree..... If we were talking an ideal world, education would
be more important and the ability to learn certainly would be more
important. "In the real world," particularly in the US, I have found that
formal education actually works to your detriment. Aside from MD's, JD's
and MBA's, graduate education is often accompanied by assorted labels
like: "over-educated," "can't decide what to do with life," "those who
can't do, teach," you can add your own to the list........ "In the real
world," there are far more interpersonal issues that come into play that
make the ability or desire to learn, even in a team setting, secondary or
even tertiary. I think Steven Covey put it best that we have gone from a
character ethic to a personality ethic. "Doing the right thing" is valued
much less than "not causing me emotional upset."
My cynical two cents worth......
--Eric N. Opp
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>