Week Notes: Vol. 3 – № 8

Not all experience is equal

How do you measure work experience?

It’s more complex than what job descriptions will lead you to believe.

Experience isn’t a number.

Dozens of assumptions are made when years become a metric. Experience isn’t fungible.

For example, a UX designer might spend an entire year producing screens from predefined requirements for a single, large initiative.

But another UX designer’s year might look like:

• 3 months making small changes to an existing journey and measuring outcomes
• 6 months shaping and de-risking new concepts before they’re built
• 2 months partnering with research or product to generate insights for a future initiative
• 1 month leading a short department improvement project alongside the UX manager

Sometimes one year of experience is more than one year of experience.

At the right company, with the right team, in the right role, one year can add up to more.

The experience I gained at a previous consulting firm amounted to way more than the two years listed under my employment history.

Experience also isn’t a title.

Your position at a company tends to say more about organizational structure than skill.

If you want to be a CEO, you can register an LLC and start your own business.

If you want to lead a global enterprise corporation through complex changes or help it create and dominate a new category, that’s a little different.

Time on the job still matters. Capability is earned in practice, not assigned in org charts.

The Peter Principle exists for a reason. Roles often expand faster than experience. A promotion doesn’t always signal preparedness.

So what is experience? How should you measure it?

Experience is context, measured by stories.

It used to drive me crazy when leaders would tell me the only thing in my way was time. But I came to realize what they meant.

You can’t expedite lived experience.

Navigating hard feedback. Helping a team member through performance issues. Hiring. Firing. Missed deadlines. Department conflict. Reorganizations.

These are important moments that can’t be checked off a list during an annual review or mastered in a simulated, two-day training session. They help you recognize your tolerance for adversity and develop resilience.

When we look at experience, repetition is everything. Doing something once isn’t proof you’re capable.

As they say: Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern.

When faced with a situation that’s similar to one you've been in before, the first time is your only reference.

Sure, you can use what you learned from before to guide you, but something will surely be different.

The third time helps you build muscle memory. Armed with more data points, you can compare and adjust more confidently.

That’s experience.

Experience doesn’t come from time or titles alone. It comes from repetition.

Increase your reps, and your experience compounds.