Does Work Experience Count?

While I was at proto.in - 2009 in Bangalore - a startup event, one of the people handling a session on starting a business asked me (I was in the audience) what I thought work experience meant. The question was unexpected; I answered impromptu. I said people with work experience usually tend to be more people oriented and more sensitive to other people's needs. The context of the question was the larger debate which was : does work experience count while starting a business and at work in general.

On mulling over it for some time, I would say work experience counts for a lot. I would argue that people who have more work experience tend to demonstrate more empathy which in turn makes them more people-oriented. This is probably because the experience of working with different types of people over extended periods make one more empathetic (is there a word like that?). This is discernible in the way they interact with employees, supervisors, customers and society at large. Another noticeable difference in people with work experience is a high attention to detail. Work experience probably sensitises one to the pitfalls of glossing over details.

While there is a corny line that goes "do you have 14 years of experience or 1 year of experience 14 times over" to denigrate work experience, this is rarely the case. Work experience matters in what are termed as critical incidents. For instance, if you observe a Project Manager at work everyday one would summarize his or her role as sending emails and tracking progress on projects. Most programmers believe they could easily do their Project Managers job. But in a crisis - a release that is not working correctly, the customer is yelling on the phone and the programmers are at their wits end on what do - a Project Manager would bring all his experience to bear in thinking through and implementing a solution. Most times the Project Manager would have thought of a solution that would have missed the programmers. This is usually the reason companies pay a premium for work experience.

If you are interested in exploring this line of thought two interesting resources ...

1) Malcolm Gladwell's book called "Outliers" where he specifically talks about the 10,000 hours rule - it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become world-class at anything

2) A post by me about the difference between Experts and Beginners available at

http://tractalent.blogspot.com/2008/09/iaea-2008-learning-2-creating.html