With age comes experience

I’ve been thinking about experience vs age.

Whilst looking for work I find myself reading a great many job adverts, and I find it amusing that companies looking for skilled individuals will list a lot of desired skills with the minimum number of years experience against each one, followed by words such as ‘junior’ or ‘graduate-level’. In other words they want someone young and cheap, but they are not legally allowed to say that.

The problem is that in order to obtain these required skills and experience another dimension must be taken into consideration: time. You see, what generally happens as you acquire 5+ years in a given skill is that you age. And given that some skills are linear whereby you progress from one set of skills to another, you tend to age more.

So with age comes experience and the longer that you are in the game acquiring skills and experience the older you get. So if you want someone that is highly skilled with lots of experience, you have to accept the fact that they will not be young nor ‘junior’.