Embrace Your Inexperience

Youthful Exuberance Prohibited 

As a lecturer to young, soon-to-be graduating college students, class discussions often run into the realm of the beyond. What’s to be expected after graduation? Will they be (or have they been) adequately prepared for the real world? Inevitably the conversation comes around to their inexperience and the part that that will play in their ability to join the work-force in short order. Intimidation often sets in, bolstered of course by their discomfort with trying to articulate the anticipated “what do you bring to the table?”

Sometimes it gets hard to listen to them grapple with their feelings of inadequacy. Knowing full well that a ticket to even the average corporate internship requires some amount of experience and that even gaining entry level jobs has become competitive, I have found myself, over the years, encouraging them to volunteer. After all, voluntarism underscores ones value to corporate citizenship and sends a positive message about our willingness to learn and serve. Nothing wrong with that…..I guess.

But in recent times, and as I continue to explore the value of adopting the entrepreneurial mind-set as a worldview….as I examine the need for creativity, innovation and personal initiative in corporate environments, I have come to believe that experience is over-rated. I cannot but drag my mind back to the realities of continuity.... of a lack-lustre, below par corporate environment that is steeped in rules, regulations and processes that confine and constrain employees to under-perform.  

What if employers began to place more value on the curiosity and fervour  that young graduates bring to the environment? What if they began to view inexperience as an asset that could help in harnessing the unconventional, leveraging the creativity that leads to innovation? What if more corporate recruiters began to think like Steve Jobs who is known to have said “it doesn’t make sense to hire smart people to tell them what to do.” What if corporate executives began to see experience as a greater risk exposure? – the huge risk of remaining constant in an ever-changing (rapidly evolving) business environment? What if the unwillingness to embrace inexperience robs companies of the following?

•         The outsiders’ advantage – Industry thought leaders have over the years assisted in innovation – incremental innovation, more often than not. The newbie, the outsider, introduces a greater likelihood of deep and thorough investigation from avenues never before pursued. He/she introduces a new perspective, asks the ‘dumb’ questions, maybe…leading to the right answers
•     The value of unlearning and re-learning – too many corporations get bogged down with ‘the way things are done.’ Learning is constrained by the conventional...the traditional. Strategies then remain reactive rather than pro-active. The benefits (though over-stated) of the ‘first-mover advantage’ are never realized. The inexperienced often bring the latest know-how technologically, theoretically and practically. All have their advantages.
• A greater readiness to explore the unexplored – Inexperience is often tied to youth and youth to exuberance. Who are more willing to challenge the status quo than youth inebriated with the desire to create and cease opportunities for renown and success?
• Hunger for success – 'Passion', purpose', 'contributing to a cause' are not only buzz words on the tongues of entrepreneurs and the people interested in them. Today there is a new breed of young, admittedly inexperienced, college graduates waiting to make their mark on the world. Their hunger drives them. They want to belong to something bigger than themselves but they want to be able to carve out their place in that ‘something.’ They want to leave their finger prints and foot prints. They want to succeed and succeed big.

Shouldn’t any right-thinking company, serious about gaining competitive advantage, therefore, embrace the possibilities that lie within the realm of inexperience? What if you, in your own personal experience, were to embrace your inexperience as an opportunity to disrupt the no-longer-working status quo? What if you saw yourself  as a critical link to the as-yet-unknown? Let's face it, in today’s business environment inexperience is no longer a disadvantage. In an age of innovation, exploration, discovery and disruption, inexperience (aka creativity, innovation, energy, experimentation) is an asset – a value you should wholeheartedly embrace!

• 
  
•