This is an issue that affects every industry, not just Agile development. There has been a long-standing myth that working a specific position for a long time builds skill in that position. According to research, experience is a very poor predictor of job performance and turnover. 1
In an interview with Alison Beard of the Harvard Business Review, Professor Van Iddekinge speculated that the reason experience is such a poor predictor of success in a new role is “that many measures of experience are pretty basic: the number of jobs you’ve held, tenure at your previous employers, years of total work, whether or not you’ve previously worked in a similar role. Those metrics tell us whether a candidate possesses experience but not about the quality or significance of that experience, which would probably have more bearing on performance.” 2
Perhaps this is why some employers have moved toward asking for “proven upward mobility,” or something similar. Will this close that gap? Will this bring employers the skills and retention they are looking for? I doubt it.
Employers want people to remain with the company because it is expensive to replace people. Most people actually do want to stay at one company. So if the company and the people want the same thing, why cant they come together and achieve it?
In software development, the issues often come down to poor management. When the Agile accountability is out of balance 3, it causes stress for the entire team. This can instigate the desire to leave the company. Even worse, junior developers, or new product owners who learn in an unbalanced system are being taught poor practices that will hurt them if they choose to move on.
According to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, the way to mitigate the issue is through evaluation. Tests designed to evaluate an applicant’s performance in actual job-specific scenarios are the most accurate predictors of on the job performance. 4 The question then becomes: how do hiring managers decide who to evaluate?
This is where the education, experience, and declaration of skills comes in. Where hiring managers get it all wrong is requiring a specific number of years of experience. That has been proven ineffective in predicting skill. If someone has the education, certification, or has performed the desired skill in the past, that person could very well be exactly who the employer is looking for.
I get it, there are a lot of people looking for jobs and hiring managers want to find every way possible to automate the process. The data is clear, the number of years a person works in a specific position does not correlate to the level of skill that person has or the amount of time that person will stay in a new company. It is time for hiring manager to realize the truth and look for new criteria. From there, actually test candidates with true-to-job experiences that can show what they are really capable of.
Comments