Experience: So Fucking Overrated

As Americans, we are overly attached to the value of experience as a measure of merit and future ability. It was the experience question that dogged President Obama during his presidential campaign (as well as Sarah Palin), as his competitors scrambled to puff up every activity they'd ever done as monumental victories for humanity, much like I did on my college applications.

From a practical standpoint, the experience question dogs all of us too; when I was looking for a job (a period of time that I am grateful to leave behind), everybody wanted so much experience for menial entry-level positions, putting job seekers in an uncomfortable Catch-22: how are you supposed to gain experience in the first place if the lowest rungs of the professional ladder already require so much experience? Even if you look right now, it's not hard to find internships that claim that "previous...experience is a must." For an internship! Internships were always held out as a way for job applicants with no experience to get their foot in the door, but it's increasingly not an option. And if you look at the job listing, it's pretty much making spreadsheets, answering phones, and setting up chairs. "Yes, Ma'am, in my previous job I had a lot of experience arranging chairs, so I would make an excellent fit with your organization."

And really...if someone has 5 years of closely related experience and is applying for your internship, you know that applicant is incredibly mediocre, or maybe stagnant at best. They would probably be looking upward otherwise.

Personally, I feel that you should choose the all-around smartest person you can who fits into your company's philosophy and culture, whether they majored in economics or basketweaving, or whether they spent the last five years making spreadsheets or taping frisbee tournaments. I would guess that the vast majority of jobs you could learn as you go along, as long as you have some basic fundamental skills and are relatively sharp. In fact, I would think that in some sectors, lack of experience would even be an asset--our recent and ongoing financial meltdown is due in large part to too many people all acting the same way and never questioning the tacit assumptions that they had accepted for so long. Someone completely new to the industry may have been able to take a step back and say, "Wait a minute...is it really smart to give $750,000 mortgages to people who don't have jobs, and then bundle thousands of those mortgages and sell them while Homer Simpson's drinking bird at Moody's rubber-stamps them with AAA ratings?"

Now, of course, this is not to say that experience is worthless; I wouldn't suggest letting an air traffic controller learn his/her job on the fly. As a general rule though, I think experience is vastly overrated. I loved Ross Perot's answer in the 1992 presidential debates when he was called on to respond vis-a-vis his relative lack of experience:

"Well, they have a point. I don't have any experience in running up a 4 trillion dollar debt."