“One of the areas that is not well understood, is that if you rely on experience as your best skill you are showing that you cannot, or will not, study. That is, you are not good with textbooks and learning.”

Assumption 1: knowledge based on experience cannot exceed that gained from textbooks (if it could than somebody who was perfectly able to study and had even done so might still have experience as their best skill)

“There are many jobs where someone who does repetitive work is needed”

Assumption 2: experience = repetition

“Now, if you cannot, or will not, pick up a text book or web site and learn new stuff then that is a career choice.”

Assumption 3: learning comes only from books and web sites

What bollocks. Yes, we all know you’re certified (some might say certifiable) and proud of it. One could hardly read this blog and not know that. Unfortunately, your pride in your own accomplishments in class does not in any way justify your obvious disdain for others’ accomplishments in the field. Sometimes “textbooks and websites” are the best or most efficient way to learn something, sometimes actually working with (or implementing) it is. In the particular case of working with, or especially inventing, new technologies there are no classes or certifications and experience is the *only* way to understand it. I know some of the people who invented MPLS and SSL, experience is clearly their best skill, but apparently you – a mere user of their technology – would assume that its inventors cannot or will not study. Some people do have the proverbial “one year of experience repeated ten times” and others have ten – or twenty or even thirty – years of genuine ever-varying experience and ever-increasing knowledge that no textbook can match. Who do you think writes those textbooks and certification curricula anyway?

Certication can ensure a particular level of knowledge across a particular range of subjects. There’s value in that, and we could reasonably argue over whether that level represents the 10th or 75th percentile in their field, but nobody – *nobody* – reaches the 90th percentile with only book learning and quite a few manage it without any kind of certification. Certification is the path upward for those who can’t find or make their own path, and it never leads to the summit.

“I am not derogatory about experience based learning”

Yes, you were. Trying to imply that those who have more experience than certification-based knowledge “cannot, or will not, study” is derogatory. Characterizing their experience as “repetitive work” and “a path that, most likely, has no progression and limited opportunities for promotion” is derogatory. Denying your obvious contempt for those not exactly like yourself only further insults readers’ intelligence.

“its just very hard to detect who has it. ”

It’s harder than finding an acronym on their resume, but not really hard in the grand scale of Things That Are Hard. As an experienced engineer, I’m fairly confident in my ability to determine which skills are relevant to the job I’m interviewing them for, and to what degree the candidate has them. As an experienced engineer who tends to work on the bleeding edge, I’m also pretty interested in whether they have a more general ability to develop skills in technical areas where no certification courses, textbooks or websites exist. Certification can in fact seem like a negative in many cases, as there are only so many hours in a day and time spent studying mature technologies is necessarily time not spent learning or extending new ones. As an employer, I generally have little use for those who can only walk a path that thousands of others have prepared for them.

“given, say, a hundren resumes, how do you identify ìexperienceî that is worthwhile ?”

There’s no simple answer, but there are certainly things you can see pretty quickly from a resume. For starters, if you have a list of technologies that you think are relevant to the position you’re filling, it takes less than a minute per resume to see how many are even mentioned. Take the top half based on that, leaving assessment of depth in each area until a later stage. To gauge general ability to pick up and learn new things, you can look at how long they’ve stayed at each job, how many projects they’ve worked on at each, how rapidly they’ve been promoted or given new responsibilities. Probably a bit more than a minute each this time, but if you take the top half again you’ve probably narrowed the field to 25 in under three hours so far, or you can make each cut a bit deeper if you want to be hasty about things.

At this point you can spend a little more than a minute per resume, and skim each to gauge quality (or credibility) of experience in each area of interest. They say they worked with technology XYZ, do they? For how long? From what you know of the company in question, plus what they say of the project and their own role in it, does it sound like the technology was central to their work or was it more peripheral? Clearly somebody who worked for a year on a project that directly involved XYZ, at a company where XYZ was a part of their core value prop, is likely to know more about it than if XYZ was merely peripheral to their project and company for three months. You can also use this information to gauge whether they’re a “jump on raw new tech” kind of person or a “perfect the old tech” kind of person, whether they’re better at the beginning or end of a project, better at working independently vs. part of a team, and so on, matching those qualities vs. your specific needs. Still, we’re talking maybe three minutes per resume, so maybe another hour total to find the ten or so who are at least worth a quick phone screen or call to your friend who worked with them.

Does half a day to review a hundred resumes sound like too much? Well, how important is it to hire the right people? Besides, you probably shouldn’t be dealing with a hundred resumes yourself anyway. If it’s not an entry-level position and you specified it properly, your pile will be way smaller to start with. If you have other senior colleagues, you should be splitting the pile with them. Lastly, if it’s still too much, you should find a good headhunter and train them to do that first pass properly. Good headhunters are rare, and you can’t really trust any of them to do the second pass right, but there are a few who can add some real value to the process. What about fees, you say? Well, if you’re hiring for such a generic position *and* there’s no trust between you and your colleagues *and* your own time is too precious to spend doing this very important part of your job *and* you still want to be very picky about who you hire (despite it being a generic position) then you’ve kind of left yourself no other options and the headhunter’s fee has to be weighed against the cost of failing to hire anyone at all.

Simply the best most reasoned knowledge worker validation post I’ve ever read.

Anti-intellectualism is wide spread and growing in the U.S. — Certifications of any kind are usually opposed, often ridiculed and seldom embraced. And I am such a Pollyanna….I’m always surprised at the bitter rhetoric of the opponents!

Is not learning fun? Satisfying? Empowering? To many it is a burden and to be avoided. And in a globlaized information economy those who don’t learn are irrelevant.

Thanks