Are You Experienced?

These words either bring to mind a piece by Jimi Hendrix or they send me scrambling for a convincing reply, depending on who is asking the question. If the person asking the question is someone sitting on the other side of a desk looking at me with a somewhat skeptical expression, that always triggers the scramble response.

To buy a few seconds, I repeat the question slowly and try spinning it ever so slightly toward something I can say yes to. Then I pull together the best answer that comes to mind and respond with as much enthusiasm and self-assurance as I can muster. I watch to see if my response makes even a slight dent in the skepticism on the other side of the desk.

After those conversations I usually berate myself for something I forgot to say and then berate myself for things I did say but should have forgotten. This is one tough question; how do you ever know if you are experienced enough to meet the expectations of people who ask that question? And then how do you know if you are too experienced?

I was talking about this with my headhunter friend Bill the other day at the coffee house; he asks that question a lot and is a pretty good judge of people and the answers he hears. Here are some of the pearls of wisdom that came out of that conversation.

Bill started by saying you know you are experienced (and maybe even too experienced) when you start saying you have 20 plus years of experience instead of giving the exact number of years. That's true I said; it’s like when the resume experts start advising you to use alternate resume formats such as the one where you don’t list more than the last 10 years of your experience, or where you just list accomplishments but don’t put down dates.

I then observed, and Bill agreed, that anyone who knows what the acronym COBOL stands for probably has plenty of experience (and maybe more than people really want to hear about). Another good experience indicator is when you realize you’ve done everything your staff and co-workers talk about - only you did it better.

Bill proposed another measure; it’s when you subtract the year you were born from the current year and come up with a number larger than the number of dollars it takes to fill up your gas tank. Another one is when people talk about stuff from “back in the day” and you realize they’re talking about something that happened after you graduated from college.

It also occurs to me that another experience indicator is the number of different word processing packages you’ve had to learn. For instance, how many word processing apps have you learned that have the word “word” in their title? (Wordstar, Wordperfect, Word).

Here’s another one. Do you remember when these little computers we have on our desks were called microcomputers instead of PCs? Do you know that’s the reason Microsoft is called Microsoft instead of PCsoft? If you do, then consider yourself pretty experienced.

In the interests of advancing the IT profession and making life easier for people who aspire to the CIO position, I’m working on a 10 question checklist to use for quckly assessing your experience level.

I think I’m going to use the question about COBOL and maybe the one about how many word processors you’ve used that have “word” in their title. I still need at least eight more questions… any ideas?