Our research reveals that the experience gap is not widely acknowledged as an important challenge for organizations, with just 48% of respondents saying it’s very or critically important. By contrast, a high percentage of respondents cite an urgent need to prioritize enduring human capabilities (figure 1) such as curiosity and emotional intelligence. These two needs are closely related: Human capabilities are essential to adaptability and are assumed to strengthen with experience, and calls for both experience and adaptability reflect an underlying need for workers with well-honed human capabilities to navigate constantly shifting contexts.
Closing the experience gap is possible, but it will require changes on both the supply and demand sides of the talent market. Hiring organizations, job seekers, and educational institutions all need to reflect on the capabilities organizations truly seek when they impose experience requirements so they can determine how to meet those underlying needs—including new approaches they might take.
Organizations will need to consider their plans in the context of key workforce tensions, such as automating tasks versus augmenting people’s ability to perform them (figure 2). In addition, leaders will also need to make decisions between using number of years of experience as a predictable output versus the potential for workers to achieve outcomes without directly relevant experience.
Why is it more difficult to gain experience today?
- The work itself—for both white- and blue-collar workers—is moving from predictable and routine to context-specific and exception-based.12 Work increasingly requires more specialization, judgment, and the ability to manage complexity. But these are hard to develop without real-world practice.
- Economic and market pressures force organizations to be more lean and agile. Automation, offshoring, and outsourcing reduce the need for workers in entry-level roles (which includes roles that don’t have significant skill requirements). Many organizations have shifted toward leaner, flatter structures with fewer managers and more contingent workers—eliminating roles that traditionally provided advancing talent with both mentoring and career stepping stones. The drive to minimize costs and maximize agility also reduces organizations’ capacity and appetite to support a layer of developing workers who are still growing in their capabilities.
- The pursuit of efficiency is pushing greater responsibilities to lower organizational rungs, raising experience expectations for staff in roles that might have once served as early career footholds. For example, interactions patients once had with their doctor were pushed first to nurses and now are often delegated to nurses’ assistants.
- Early-career workers often are less prepared for work. Social connection and interaction appear to be declining rapidly, especially among young people.13 Teen employment is generally low globally14 and has been in steady decline for decades.15These developments have hindered development of the social and emotional qualities new workers need to operate effectively. Nearly 6 in 10 (57%) US hiring organizations told a December 2023 survey that recent college graduates lacked professionalism required for work, and almost 4 in 10 (38%) avoid hiring recent Gen Z college graduates in favor of older workers because of these gaps.
What’s at stake?
Consider the following:
- 42% of workers in India under the age 25 who have a graduate degree were unemployed as of 2022, despite an overall unemployment rate of just 6.6%.18
- Only about half of US workers with a bachelor’s degree secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation; the other half end up underemployed, typically for about 10 years.19
- China’s youth unemployment rate reached a record high of 21.3% in 2023.20
Organizations that don’t take steps to overcome the experience gap face the prospect of atrophied pipelines for future talent.
Closing the experience gap will equip hiring organizations to be smarter and more strategic about where and how to look for the capabilities they need while expanding the sources of talent available to them.
For workers, the challenges may be even more acute: gainful employment today and rewarding financial and career outcomes tomorrow. Addressing this gap will better position workers to make informed choices about where and how they prepare themselves.
Read the full article by David Mallon, Sue Cantrell, John Forsythe / Deloitte
