Does experience = competence?

It’s time to remove the experience bias.

It’s important to focus on skill over experience if you want to remain competitive and ensure you retain the best employees.

Some organizations equate experience with competence

I often see competency models with the following proficiency scale or something similar:

1.      Have never performed this task

2.      Have performed this task with support

3.      Have performed this task 1-3 times

4.      Have performed this task 4-10 times

5.      Have performed this task >10 times

In essence, proficiency or competence is being measured with experience.

Do you know anyone who has done something for a long time, like 15 years, and is still not someone you’d call a subject matter expert? If you have a new hire who needs to learn that task, do you put them with this individual just because they’ve done it a long time? Of course not.

Experience does not equal competence. Experience equals merely experience. That’s someone who has done something for a long time… not necessarily well.

Use skills to demonstrate competence

It’s not THAT you have done something before. It’s how WELL you do it. It’s easy to have experience and still have a skill gap. That’s the problem with the above proficiency scale. It only measures experience at a point in time. And that doesn’t drive action — certainly not behavior change. It will never accurately identify or measure a person’s skills gap nor will it recognize and present personalized competency-based learning to help close those gaps.

And yet, some organizations treat experience and competence as if they are the same. And that can lead to real generational challenges as new people with less experience prove that they are more proficient than those with many years of experience.

Recognize skills over experience for employee retention

It’s time to remove the experience bias.

Millennials and Gen Z want to come into a company and be able to move up quickly. They are generally willing to put in the work it takes to learn the skills. So they want competence without much experience. And I believe they can get it. If you don’t believe me, I’m sure you can talk to Mark Zuckerberg, or one of the other wildly successful entrepreneurs who were barely 21. 

It’s important to focus on skill over experience if you want to remain competitive and ensure you retain the best employees.

Actually learning the skills assumes they are provided with a competency assessment system that enables them to assess where they are now compared to where they need to be, and provides them with targeted, personalized learning recommendations to get from here to there.

Consider what will happen when a motivated, high performing Gen Z individual enters the organization and quickly demonstrates a capacity to learn and grow quickly (growth mindset), but are blocked from career growth by an organizational experience bias. How long will they stay? And how competitive will your organization be in the future if you keep experienced but less skilled people?

For more on these trends, read a white paper on why employees taking charge is good for you.