Why Experience No Longer Matter for Your Career

Experience is usually seen as a positive quality for managers. Indeed, it is often given as a reason for career advancement. It is believed that, having solved problems in the past, managers will be able to do so with greater speed and accuracy in the future.

This assumes, however, that the future will be like the past. That may have been so at a time when change was slow and predictable. But this is no longer the case. Many business situations and problems are now quite different from those in the past, so no one has any experience of how to solve them. What you’ve done in the past is no longer good enough.

Change does not take place at the same speed everywhere, of course. Some branches of industry, for example, still have an apprenticeship model of training. One works with a master for maybe as long as five to ten years, starting out doing trivial tasks and ending up by taking his or her place. Training in music is still like this, partly because playing a musical instrument has changed little in a hundred years.

However, in most areas, as technology and practices change, skills gained through experience are worthless. You don’t have to be very old to remember the old technology: how to use a slide rule or how to feed a punch card into a mainframe. These are lost skills for a lost form of work, and this experience is now not at all useful.

But there is an even more serious problem. In many business fields, experience may not only be irrelevant, it can even work against you. Take, for example, the case of new software that is radically different from the last version. In such cases, old learning can make new learning difficult. We become wedded to familiar technology and give it up with great reluctance.

Another good example took place during the Second World War, when young people learned to fly before they could drive. They did so more quickly and efficiently precisely because they did not have to unlearn some of the natural reactions they might have acquired while learning to drive a car.

But what about management, rather than technology? Surely people have not changed fundamentally over the past several hundred years, so that managing people is a longlasting and transferable skill. It follows that experience in managing people must be a good thing or is it?

In fact, there are considerable differences between generations – of values, rather than biology. Issues such as job security, empowerment and training opportunities are valued quite differently by different generations. They have other carrots and sticks.

The best lesson of experience is that one really does need constant learning. Just as an actor is only as good as his last production, and a cook is only as good as his last meal, so managers are only as good as the last business problems they have solved. One has to learn to unlearn management techniques that worked in the past and to embrace new ideas.

The best experience, therefore, is learning to learn. If we do this, then our experience will indeed be a good teacher.