Lets say you are searching for a job, but you don’t know the industry, haven’t worked enough years, or perhaps haven’t worked directly on the functional area. Most managers of human resource departments, will even refuse to look deeper into your curriculum vitae. The reason: you lack the required experience. Are these factors good enough to assess a candidate? I would say that it isn’t always the case.
We can start by going over the positive attributes of getting relevant experience. If you already know the industry, or the functional area, you can use most of the time on the tasks that are demanded by your job. Those extra years on the work force would increase the odds that you have experienced enough situations to relate to, when facing a new one. From a learning point of view, experiencing stuff that happens in the real world can be for some people more powerful than reading about it, besides the fact that they’ll be able to witness first hand those things that were left out by the author.
On the other hand, a motivated worker will rapidly get the industry and functional knowledge to support most of the repeating tasks required by the job. Also, the worker can relate arising situations to those experiences that aren’t directly relevant but still occurred in the past. Moreover, if the worker does bring past experience from a different industry or functional area, this will bring thought diversity to the company teams, and a fresh set of eyes to look at issues that have already lost the novelty for those with years of relevant experience.
The last issue is perhaps the most challenging. That lack of novelty stales innovation, while promoting the status quo: I’ll keep doing it this way, because that’s the way it’s always been done. The experience trap comes from the fact that experience only gives you one discrete and particular turn of events, which for most business or practical issues are so complex, that many causal relationships are often missed.
Under these conditions, generalizations are hard, if not ill advised to make them. Decisions and procedures aren’t easily transferred to a similar set of conditions. It is often not the result that can be reused, but the method used to search for the result. But methods are seldom industry, functional, or time specific. Therefore, there isn’t any reason to filter a candidate for a lack of relevant experience. In practice, this very fact can very well be its most valuable asset.
This is the reason why most disruptive competitors often come from companies that aren’t directly involved in the industry. For years, mobile phone makers had a way of creating devices. Today, the most revolutionary device, the iPhone, came from a computer company, Apple, not a phone maker. For even longer, Nescafe was synonym of instant coffee, only to be challenged by the introduction of personal single serving packs by a coffee shop chain, Starbucks (read my previous post on Nestle vs. Starbucks for more on this case).
When you seek to feed your decision making process with the outcomes of the same experiences over and over again, you reduce the variability of your outcomes. In this era of global and heavy competition, it makes sense to try to achieve change from within your organization, instead of following it from an outsider who challenges your business. Focus on methods, rather than outcomes; on wisdom, rather than knowledge, and perhaps, you may have a chance at it. How important do you really think it is to have direct relevant experience?
