Experience is Overrated – Scott Berkun

Experience is only a chance to learn. It does not guarantee any lessons or skills. A resume for someone who worked at a company for ten years, even a fancy one, ensures only that they learned how not to get fired. Maybe they slept with the boss, or were the low performer others kept around so they’d look good. The quantity of their experience alone promises nothing.

We make decisions about people based on our positive assumptions about their experience, denying our knowledge of experienced people in our lives who suck at what they do, despite how long they’ve done it.  The experience of a proud parent with 5 adult children means little if they’re all in prison and hate their Mom and Dad. A VP at a Fortune 500 corporation whose division succeeded in spite of their incompetence, has a deceptive track record that does not tell you the important parts of the story.

Many on this planet go through life being mediocre at most things they do – it’s not a shortage of experience that’s the problem. Sometimes someone who is smart, honest and motivated but has no experience at all, will perform better than someone with a superficially impressive career we can only judge from the most biased source possible: their own opinion.