The Hindu Business Line : The value of experience

I WAS recently in Kodaikanal to organise a workshop. After the workshop, as I got into the car on my to Madurai, I was shocked to see that my driver looked all of 16! I asked him how old he was and if he had a licence. He told me he was 18 and that he had, in fact, been driving for over two years! I had a train to catch and so little choice but to go with him. As the young lad negotiated each of the 20 odd hairpin bends, I began to understand how much I valued experience!!!

As the world watches with admiration, India is adding thousands of young men and women to its workforce every month. What is going unnoticed is the brewing crisis of experience. The 18-year-old driver I encountered at Kodaikanal is not the exception but almost the rule in many occupations. Be it the neighbourhood hairdresser, the store manager at the supermarket, the lecturer at the engineering college, the dentist, the banker, the repair man, the factory workman, the sales person — they are all young and enthusiastic. They are all, however, thin on experience.

While some parts of the world are worried about losing experience on account of their greying workforce, for India, the problem is about not having enough of the greying employees around in many critical roles.

In this edition, we attempt to understand why India and the rest of the world are suddenly sitting up and celebrating the real value of experience. We will also look at ways in which organisations are nurturing the young by systematically passing on the wisdom and shaping their experience.

It must be clarified that the attempt here is to go beyond the usual emotional impressions that the experienced have about the inexperienced and vice versa, and look at the hard logic around the subject. It is not about putting down youthful vigour but about acknowledging the power of practical wisdom.

How do we define experience as required for any occupation or profession or trade? Is it a matter of individual judgment and opinion or is there a science behind it?

Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap have coined the phrase `deep smarts' to explain this. In their book by the same title, they define deep smarts as the accumulated knowledge, know-how, and intuition gained through extensive experience that form the engine of the organisation, and provide the foundation for individual success. They look at it as expertise in the form of practical wisdom.

The US Department of Labour uses an interesting term for this. They call it Specific Vocational Preparation (SVP) and define it as the amount of lapsed time required by a typical worker to learn the techniques, acquire the information, and develop the facility needed for average performance in a specific job-worker situation. They go on to specify that such training may be acquired in a school, work, instructional, or vocational environment.

What this clearly outlines is the fact that a certain amount of lapsed time is required before anyone can display an acceptable level of job performance. What this also implies is the fact that a set of deliberate actions need to occur during this lapsed time.

Different occupations require different levels of SVP. The more specialist the occupation, the higher the SVP requirement is likely to be.

It follows that this is a given reality and cannot be changed or shortened, however acute the business need might be. This is where the problem begins. For years, organisations hired people at the lowermost levels and patiently nurtured the "preparation" process. They helped people gain the necessary experience to turn out acceptable levels of work output. All of this is changing, especially in countries such as India. The current rush to scale and grow rapidly has led organisations to "buy" this experience or live with lesser than acceptable levels of it.

The results show in several ways. Managers end up stepping down one or two levels below to "fix" or "rectify" issues caused by this lack of experience and in turn neglect their own managerial work. Errors caused by lack of experience result in expensive waste and rework.

Inexperienced employees who make repeated mistakes lose their sense of confidence and leave their jobs in search of a more appropriate fit. Most importantly, hapless customers put up with poor product and service quality. Sounds familiar?

While all organisations recognise this problem, most struggle to find a solution. They lament about the fact that educational institutions could do more to bridge this gap, especially given the already high cost at which these employees are being hired. Many hesitate to invest in this preparation process for the fear that they will lose them to the streets. The high cost of the scarce number of experienced employees also forces organisations to maintain a healthy mix of "experienced" and "fresh" employees.

The supervisory workforce which is primarily charged with the responsible of training the fresh employees goes through the same dilemma, especially in a turbulent labour market. They know that they may not reap the benefit of their training investment by way of reasonable tenure.

For the older and more traditional businesses the problem is at the other end of the spectrum. They realise that a significant percentage of their highly experienced and skilled workforce may soon retire. They realise that this experience is invaluable and hard to replace.

For these traditional organisations, the problem is of losing their deep experience. Especially for those in technical and knowledge based roles, the loss is significant.

My own analysis tells me that the manufacturing businesses in India are likely to face the experience challenge in the next five years and beyond. Even as the more lucrative software opportunities have kept promising engineers from entering manufacturing professions over the past several years resulting in the lack of engineering depth of adequate numbers, the experienced ones too have moved on in search of more rewarding opportunities.

The lack of investment in continuous education also seems to have prevented a large number of experienced workmen from progressing into even supervisory positions. Where voluntary separation programmes have operated, it has led to a further depletion of experience. All this certainly points to a rather serious concern for the future.

What then is the way out? How do we develop an experienced workforce? Is it just a matter of waiting for them to grow old or are there more deliberate workforce practices that will lead to a better skills and wisdom situation in the future.

It is often erroneous to believe that if people are pushed into the water they will learn to swim. On the other hand, a set of deliberate and systematic efforts are called for, for this transfer of wisdom to happen.

Let us examine some of the options that many organisations are actively pursing today.

Investment in technical training

Progressive organisations are making significant investments in establishing technical training infrastructure to transfer valuable knowledge and expertise to their new employees to make them effective on the job quickly.

Mentoring programmes

Organisations are also promoting a very active mentoring culture within the organisation. These mentors who tend to be highly skilled supervisors or leads are charged with the specific responsibility of training and guiding new entrants. It is no longer positioned as a favour for the new entrant and the organisation but is seen as an integral part of his or her job.

Valuing older employees

I have not seen many organisations succeeding in this area. We somehow seem to have a difficulty in accepting and honouring the unique capabilities that older employees bring to the table. We tend to judge them with the same parameters that we use to judge young employees — speed, ability to adapt to change, ability to take risks and so on. We do not seem to value things that they bring to the job — the maturity in handling people, the depth of experience in specific areas, the ability to see a problem from a larger perspective, the ability to diagnose root causes and so on.

Organisations would do well to leverage their inherent strengths and assign them the opportunity to pass on their wisdom to others around them.

Emphasis on seasoning in the job

Organisations are overcoming the temptation of using rapid promotions as a means of retaining talent and are beginning to insist on a certain level of preparedness for the new role by way of a certain amount of seasoning in the earlier role. This deliberate slowing down is certainly adding to the depth and eventual effectiveness of these employees.

Experience is vital and experience delivers value. To the customer experience reassures. To the young employee experience guides. To the organisation, experience is wisdom. Respecting it and nurturing it will do the organisation and the nation a lot of good. Long live experience!

(The author is founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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