Experience that counts

Want a satisfying career? Work on chalking up quality of work rather than years on the job.

How much experience do you have? If you think your experience is equal to the number of years spent in your profession, you could be right and wrong.

Right, because as time passes, each year does add to your professional experience. Such an experience, however, is like ageing. It grows steadily with the change of dates in the calendar. Call it "quantitative experience".

In reality, however, quantitative experience alone doesn't carry much value in the job market. In fact, the older a person, the more difficult it is for him to feel secure in his job or to get a new job.

It is not enough to view experience only in quantitative terms. One also needs to consider the "quality" of experience. Call it "qualitative experience".

The qualitative experience of a person reflects how he has spent all those years at work. Was it spent handling progressively more challenging assignments or doing routine, repetitive work? Was it spent gaining new knowledge and skills or stagnating on both counts? Was it spent at the threshold of his full potential or well below it?

Qualitative experience, in a way, is a measure of how far the person has come in the journey of overall competence and personal growth. A bitter reality, but in qualitative terms, a person with 15 years of experience may be no different from a person with five years of experience.

Indeed, many people realize the imbalance between the quantity and quality of their experience only towards the advanced stages of their careers. That is when they find it hard to justify their value to their present and prospective employers.

Obviously, the job market favors those who have the quality of experience that matches the quantity. Here are some suggestions to help you improve the quality of your experience to turn it into an asset:

Play back your day
Being mindful of how you are spending your time at work is the first step towards improving the quality of your experience. At the end of a day, spare a few minutes to review how you spent the time during the day.

As you get into the habit of playing back your day, your awareness about your working habits and patterns will improve gradually.

Minimize and maximize
Review the various tasks you get involved with and see which of the two categories they fall into:

• Hollow: These activities don't challenge you but keep you busy and comfortable, such as dealing with e-mail, attending long meetings, participating in fruitless discussions, and handling documents without any value addition.


• Solid: These activities require you to think, stretch, stay alert and be slightly uncomfortable. Examples include solving problems, handling unexpected situations, planning and strategizing.

One sure way to improve the quality of experience is to minimize your involvement in hollow activities and maximize it in the solid ones.

Glow as you grow
For some professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and teachers, the need for continuous growth in knowledge and skills comes with the job. You rarely find a surgeon or a lawyer with 15 years of experience feeling threatened by another with five years' experience.

But many other occupations have a short learning curve without emphasis on any specialized piece of knowledge or skills. As a result, you may end up doing some unchallenging work repeatedly for many years, without ever growing in knowledge and skills.

Regardless of your occupation, treat each day as an opportunity to acquire knowledge and hone your skills. Continuous learning is the only way to glow as you grow.

Play to your strengths
Everyone has some strengths and weaknesses. When you use your strengths, you do well, enjoy work and achieve more. On the flip side, weaknesses make you struggle.

The choice is clear: To be proud of your experience, let it be full of times when you were applying your strengths.

As you continue to work day after day, you must keep asking yourself the following question, posed by the best-selling author, Wayne Dyer: "Have you really lived ten thousand or more days, or have you lived one day ten thousand or more times?"

Copyright © Atul Mathur, 2004
This article first appeared in The Straits Times on 25 February 2004.

← Back to Article listing