Experience vs Expertise

There are jokes aplenty about how jobs want you to have 10 years of experience (or some other absurd number) by the time you’ve graduated college, generally implying that you need to have started on your career even prior to high school in order to have enough experience to get an entry-level position. The sad part is that these jokes are born from a kernel of truth.

And I understand the cognitive dissonance here: college degrees are mostly meaningless in determining whether you can do a particular job. They are primarily a tool for filtering out potential candidates so there are fewer applications to manually process.

Now this isn't true of all college degrees; some professions benefit greatly from the time spent on so-called "higher education". Lawyers and doctors, for example, are people whom you want to have done a lot of studying to become very nearly academic experts in their respective fields prior to them performing any work. However, for most professions, it’s just a box to check off to filter down the number of applicants to consider.

For example, I’m getting a Bachelor’s degree in business administration. In one of the courses, there was a large section on employment discrimination, and at the end it said - and I'm paraphrasing this - “it’s hard to know if you’re discriminating in some cases so just try really hard not to.”

Wow. Super helpful. Really glad that this is the level of education our managers, chief officers, human resource staff, and others are receiving.

It certainly would explain why so many large companies seem to fail extravagantly at preventing discrimination. But really, I don’t need to pay money to a college to tell me what discrimination is without any solid advice or framework for preventing it; anyone going into that class is either already knowledgeable about preventing discrimination or will be just as clueless after the class as they were prior to it.

And that’s just one example of hundreds I could personally give. I’m sure that number is many orders of magnitude greater if I were to pull in random other graduates from all walks of life. But the fact remains that a degree used to be a great way to go from hundreds, or even thousands, of applicants to just a handful or so. These days, that’s not enough. Too many people have taken on crushing debt to get a degree so they can have just a shot in the dark at a well-paying job. And so businesses have to use some additional measurement to filter applicants, and that measure tends to be experience.

What Does Experience Mean?

The definition of experience is roughly “knowledge or skill derived from personal interaction, generally trial-and-error or practice or some other repeated process.” The only problem with this, however, is that people assume that 10 years of working at a job has earned someone more experience than someone working at a similar job for only 2 years.

That’s objectively incorrect.

Once you have experience with something, that’s it, there is no counter that keeps increasing; you have gained the experience. It’s a boolean (yes/no, true/false, etc) and not a number. For example: riding a bike. Either you can or you can't.

I can hear you now though: but some people are better at riding bikes than others! That's because of experience! Yes. Sorta.

Once you've learned something, you learned it, it's done. Even if your form on a bike isn't great, if you can keep yourself balanced while moving yourself forward, you have the skill that is riding a bike. Period. What you don't have is expertise.

Let's say I have to build a program that operates over a network with other programs. I could consider that "application networking" experience. But if I'm just doing the same thing for 5 years, I'm not necessarily getting all that much better at "application networking" as a skill, I'm just repeating the same steps over and over again. But if I have to build two vastly different networked applications in the span of 3 years, and now I know about UDP and P2P in addition to the standard TCP, well now I have more expertise than if I had just done the same thing for longer.

Allow me to demonstrate with a real-life anecdote. Once upon a time there was a company that had high turnover in a particular department. Within this department was, however, a single employee had been with the company for more than 10 years. They had promoted him a few times, given him raises and bonuses, and altogether praised him.

This company was eventually bought by another and it was time to identify who to keep and who to cut. A team investigated all current roles and their job responsibilities and how crucial those tasks were to the overall process. This employee that had been with the company for over 10 years seemed like a definite keeper. Management claimed he had the most experience at his job and was an expert at what he did, and loyal too.

The assessing team interviewed him, was walked through his job duties and how they were performed, and the judgement was that he had the same knowledge that employees with 1 or 2 years of experience had. Indeed, after that first year it seemed that instead of learning anything new he simply took what he learned when he started and played it on repeat for over 10 years. This story comes straight from one of the assessors.

In this case, we can see that assuming the number of years someone has worked a job, their experience to use the current lingo, did not match either the breadth or depth within that particular knowledge domain that he was supposedly an expert.

A Request for Expertise

Given that college degrees are losing their value and that total number of years spent working isn’t analogous to someone’s breadth or depth of knowledge or skills, I think we need to abandon the concept of years of experience in favor of expertise.

The definition of expertise is “skill or knowledge in a particular area.” Whereas experience has implications on how the skill or knowledge is obtained, expertise focuses only on what the skill or knowledge is for. To say that someone has basic Java expertise means they can read and write Java code and create at least a simple working application. Having advanced Java expertise could mean being able to create resource-efficient code with graceful error-handling. And, much like the true definition of experience, having expertise in something is a boolean value, so you either have expertise with something or you don’t. You might be in the process of obtaining the skill or knowledge to do something, which means you don’t have expertise yet. Once you’re done, however, you suddenly have expertise, full-stop, end of story, case closed.

What’s great about this concept is that how many years someone spends doing something matters less than what they do with all that time spent. If someone is doing the same thing year after year, but has the same expertise as someone with only a single year of work history, they would look identical on a resume. Sure, cumulative work history is going to play a part still, in all likelihood, but it’s now possible for people to obtain expertise over a short period of time and outpace potential applicants that choose to simply do their work without learning anything new. As another example, I gained an immense amount of expertise in my first two years at a full-time position with Sony Online Entertainment, more than I learned in the following two years. And yet, people were definitely judging me based on two years of experience rather than on the expertise I gained during that time.

Potential Pitfalls

There are two immediate concerns that spring to mind with this, however. The first is that I do not believe anyone should be compelled to engage in career-related growth outside of work hours. I personally believe that your work should encourage and foster your career growth, unless you plan to change careers completely. Unfortunately, almost no company actually does this, even if they say they do. More companies have gotten better about this, no doubt, but it still remains a fact that most companies will expect you to gain new expertise on your time and usually on your own dollar.

The second concern is that there needs to be a fairly high degree of standardization across potential areas of expertise in order for recruiters to judge candidates correctly. If someone said “I have expertise in Web Development”, that means nothing if “Web Development” doesn’t have a standard definition we can apply to it. I’m not sure how such a standard would be created and maintained, but it would be critical to the widespread success of such a system.

However, it is possible to claim expertise with common technologies, tools, and processes. For example, Scrum Management is a specific process that has a standard meaning. Java, the programming language, is a standard technology. There are definitely things that we can, right now, start claiming expertise in as long as it relates to something common and specific that carries a standard meaning.