For the past 6 weeks, we’ve had a delightful British PhD student continuing her research in our office as part of her program.  Tomorrow is her last day in the office, so we put together a lunch seminar where we could all get pizza, and she could present some of her findings.  It was all very interesting, even if the science of it went way over my head.

Part of her research involves Flow Cytometry.  I won’t go into the details of her research (she’s about to publish a paper and still needs to finish her thesis), but one anecdote  really struck me.  She was discussing the wide array of experience of the subjects in her study (all flow technicians), and one of our colleagues asked if a particular skew in the data was due to inexperience vs. experience.  She laughed and told us this story:

Every participant was asked how long they had been using this technology.  In one group, she had an older man that said he’d been using this technology for 8 years next to a young researcher that had only been using it for less than a year.

Which one do you think had more experience, and therefore would have better understanding of the technology and data?

Obviously, she assumed the one with 8 years of experience would have the greater expertise and clearly accurate results.  It turns out that the man who said he’d been using this technology for 8 years had only used the technology once… 8 years ago.  The one that had been using it for less than a year used it on a daily basis and was far more accurate in his data analysis.

Now which one would you trust to use the technology or to read the data in the correct way?  What if the results of the test determined the effectiveness of your cancer treatment or what the correct dose of a treatment should be?

I suppose it is all context and self-promotion.  The first man wanted to be an ideal subject in the study with the confidence and bravado of an expert, even though his experience was simply +1 of the average person (those who do not work in labs).  In contrast, the young researcher may have felt she didn’t have enough experience, and therefore would be judged unworthy.*

Who would over-inflate their experience?  Almost everyone, you’ll find.

In my careers, I’ve had to vet many job applicants and decide whether or not they were worth interviewing based solely on their resumes.  What is a resume used for other than self-promotion?  It’s an audition on paper to get you in the door.  Most (we hope) are truthful, but a lot that I have seen are… ‘enhanced,’ shall we say?  (I also have opinions on multiple-page resumes, but that’s for another time.).  We just recently had a situation in my office where a temp that was hired obviously did not have the Office suite experience she said she did.

When I was looking for a job, I certainly tailored my resume and my cover letters to highlight how perfect I was for the position they were looking to fill.  I didn’t lie, though.  Like the older man above, however, I did list software that I had used in the last 20 years, just in case one of my future employers exclaimed:

“He knows Artsoft (an out-of-date DOS-based ticketing finance system)! We must hire him!!”

In my mind, I was showing that I was adaptable and could easily become proficient in a variety of software and platforms, but I can see now how it may have looked like I was just throwing as many up there as I could.  (Side note: On the train home this evening, someone had a backpack advertising Word Perfect. Remember that? Is it still in use?)

For my current position, I was specifically asked in my second interview (first face-to-face) if I knew PowerPoint.  Without hesitation (thankfully), I said that while I was familiar with it, it had been many years since I had had to use it, so I would need to have a refresher.  I went home that day, downloaded it, and familiarized myself before my next interview.

You see, my boss has continuously used it on an almost-daily basis for over 13 years.  Based solely on the interviewer’s one question, I was afraid that she would ask me to do something complicated that I wouldn’t know how to do, and they’d find out I’m a fraud.  Gradually, I came to realize that she wasn’t using it to its full potential – mostly because she has so many ideas in her head, she can’t take the time to make one thought look good before moving on to the next.  So out of my own personal need for her brilliant ideas to come across in a more appealing and accessible way, I’ve taught myself tricks and functions in PP that she never bothered with.  Now, we have fun coming up with graphics or animations to make the message more dynamic.  Two weeks ago, she drew a crazy matrix of lines and boxes to demonstrate her point on a whiteboard.  A colleague tried to reinvent it in a linear way, but it didn’t make sense.  I recreated the confusing (to me, clear to everyone else) graphics directly from her drawings, and she thought I was the most brilliant person in the room (for a change) because it’s not something she could have done.

Now anytime there is a graphic needed, she sketches it up and I make it.  Together, we bring our left brain and right brain focuses together to create a better product.  It’s not about hours logged of experience, it’s about comfort with complimentary aspects of the software.  I can easily put “proficient in PowerPoint” on my resume now.

Have you ever enhanced your experience to impress someone or to get a job?  Did it work?  I’d love to hear your stories.

 

 

*In a similar, though tangential, example, think of a senior sales manager and a junior salesperson.  The manager left the field 10 years ago, but oversees, mentors and motivates the sales staff.  The manager has overall experience in the industry and the staff has real-time, current experience in the field.  If this were real estate, for example, which experience would you want most in your corner as a seller?  The manager may know the history and have a long-view of the market, so he tells you to price at value to be safe, but the agent just sold the crappy house down the street for $30k over asking price because she knows what is happening in the current market, the inventory, and the buyers.  Ideally, you want them working together.