Experience or Not

Applying for a job or position at some business can be very frustrating for a person new into the field or someone just finishing high school or college. One of the first things that you see is, “How much experience do you have?” or you must have a certain number of years of experience. No wonder there are so many companies still looking for employees, they want the perfect one, someone that will jump right in and know exactly what to do and don’t need to be told. Hello, not everyone is trained or has the experience but they are willing to learn. Companies do not want to train or give anyone a chance, they want you to come in, do the job right and go home.

I recently became one of those people looking for work due to unforeseen circumstances and was forced into early retirement. I’m only fifty-one and too young to retire so I looked into working from home at something that I am truly passionate about, writing. I looked into some freelance writing gigs and other work, set up my own website and cv, then looked into getting some work, and every time I look at a job posting they want at least a year or more experience. How are you supposed to get experience if no one will give you a chance, really? If they are willing to give someone a chance, they might just find that diamond in the ruff or maybe just a dud. Give them that chance, you may be surprised and if they don’t work out let them know and that person will be grateful just because you took the time and gave them that chance.

Throughout the world, there are many experts in different fields for different kinds of work. With the economy constantly growing they can not keep up with the training for these positions or find the experts or people with enough experience. This is where the employer must make some changes and sacrifices for the company to grow and become successful, take the chance and hire an applicant who doesn’t have the experience and give them a chance. If more companies did this and had a probation period they would find the employees that they are looking for instead of that one perfect employee. In that stack of resumes that are before you could be that perfect employee, but because they have no experience you will never know. There are times that when you hire someone with no experience and a week later you hire someone that has the experience, the person with no experience will probably know more than the experienced because he was more eager to learn these new skills and put them to use showing that he is able to do the job. Whereas the employee that you hired with the experience will take longer to do the job cause he was not shown how to do it cause he was supposed to know but didn’t cause he had a different kind of experience.

Experience. What do they mean when they say do you have experience? What kind of experience? When they ask for experience, do they mean the kind of experience from a job or something that you are good at but never ever worked at it. There are many people out there that have a special skill. They never trained or went the school, they can just do it and do it well. These are the kinds of people companies are missing out on cause they want experience, yet the perfect person for the position you just threw into the reject pile because he or she didn’t have any experience. As I mentioned earlier, set up a probation period. This is a set amount of time for when a company hires a new employee, experienced or not they have to go through this trial period and at the end, if you meet the requirements, you would probably be hired by the company or not if you didn’t meet them. This is what employment agencies do when they find work for people. They might not have the experience but they are taken on as a temporary employee for a certain time and in that time if you do not meet the requirements the company can let you go with no reason at all.