Closing the experience gap

This experience gap—the gulf between what employers demand and what workers bring—presents a thorny and ever-present riddle: Workers can’t get jobs without having the required experience. But they can’t acquire the necessary experience without foothold jobs or equivalent opportunities. Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School, sums it up this way: “Everybody wants to hire somebody with three years’ experience, and nobody wants to give them three years’ experience.”⁹

While this gap has always been a challenge, the ability to gain experience is being complicated by new developments such as AI taking on certain tasks, the erosion of the apprenticeship model with remote work, and the growing complexity of work, which increasingly demands more—and more varied—types of experience.

Where can workers begin when it’s never been harder to start?

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.

What is experience, really?

What do we mean when we talk about experience? Most people think of how much time has been spent executing directly relevant tasks. But time spent is a proxy, and a potentially poor one, for what leaders need from workers.

What leaders really need from experience in today’s environment is an expanded definition: the ability for workers to apply skills, knowledge, and human capabilities in context—under real-world conditions and external constraints—to create outcomes.

An individual’s potential, skills, and human capabilities such as curiosity, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving can be applied across multiple contexts. Over time, workers develop mental frameworks that enable them to quickly process new contexts and adapt their performance accordingly.

Human capabilities and potential should receive billing at least equal to skills (figure 3), and they should serve as equal anchors for matching workers to work. For example, consider why a restaurant server might be an effective candidate for a department store floor sales job. The reason is not just their customer service skills, but also their ability to empathize with customers (a human capability), and the potential to grow over time to take on new responsibilities. By applying these in context and practicing them in a new domain, they can build the experience the organization needs.

When an organization attaches an experience requirement to a role, it’s betting that a worker who has practiced applicable tasks over the specified time will have repeated the process enough in different contexts to develop judgment and form the frameworks that support adaptability.

Deloitte has long-defined skills broadly to encompass “hard” or technical skills (such as coding, data analysis, and accounting), human capabilities (such as critical thinking and emotional intelligence), and potential (including latent qualities, abilities, or adjacent skills that may be developed and lead to future success). Eventually, we see the word “skills” as becoming short-hand for more granularly defining workers as unique, whole individuals—with an array of skills, interests, passions, motivations, work or cultural styles, location preferences and needs, and more.

Johnson & Johnson, for example, recently shifted beyond a strictly skills-based approach to a whole-person model that considers skills, experiences, aspirations, traits, and motivations. Likewise, organizations should focus on defining “whole work,” including the outcomes, skills, human capabilities, and importantly, contexts in which the work will happen.

Medtronic, a medical device company, sought to diversify its workforce and remove barriers for job seekers by moving away from traditional degree requirements. The company partnered with workforce education provider InStride to recredential 65 roles across 17 job families—not just inventorying the skills needed in those roles but also describing the contextual pathways in which those skills are used, then pairing developmental programs with these pathways. The exercise is helping attract a broader pool of talent, create a more inclusive hiring process, and ensure that workers are prepared to use skills in context. Today, half of Medtronic’s information technology workers are in roles that do not require a degree.¹⁰

Why is it more difficult to gain experience today?

Organizations were historically built to accommodate a flow of workers with little experience, and workers were allowed to grow into creating value. Entry-level roles suited a wide variety of candidates and involved work that required only human capabilities and widely transferable skills. Many organizations employed immersion and apprenticeship models where less experienced workers gain knowledge and wisdom from experienced colleagues through repeated exposure to the work and ongoing guidance.¹¹

Shifts in the world have undermined those models.

• 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.¹⁵ These 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.¹⁶
  

These trends have been underway for years, but AI and other technologies amplify them. New technologies can perform certain rote tasks more efficiently than more junior workers; the work that remains increasingly involves addressing complex, exceptional situations. And the more powerful the technology, the more necessary and valuable workers’ judgment becomes.

The status quo is likely to disappoint both organizations and their people in the years to come. Organizations need new approaches to bring people in and develop their capabilities. Those that succeed stand to create stronger, more sustainable outcomes for both their business and their people.

What’s at stake?

The chasm between organizational needs and workers’ experience could be detrimental to organizations. Recent studies suggest that there may be a global talent shortage by 2030.¹⁷

Despite this potential shortage, many countries in the world are currently facing significant challenges of unemployment and underemployment, pointing to the experience gap dilemma.

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.

Closing the experience gap through sourcing and development

While most talent acquisition strategies rely on sourcing candidates based on years of experience, a new mindset and set of practices is needed for both sourcing and ongoing development of people to close the experience gap.

To do so, organizations should develop and source from external pools that provide ingredients of experience. Pair sourcing with experiential learning to help create talent pools composed of candidates who have the judgment and adaptability that typically come with experience.

Consider the following approaches for sourcing.

•  Unpack experience and degrees together. Many organizations are removing degree requirements. It makes sense to unpack experience requirements at the same time to make sure they align with the organization’s underlying needs.

• Audit your recruiting algorithms. Use talent acquisition tools but verify their work. New sourcing and hiring tools can make it harder for less experienced workers to get a foot in the door. They can narrow employers’ field of vision in ways that can make it difficult for potential workers with experiences in transferrable contexts to get noticed, especially for new entrants and career-changers. One way of doing this, for example, is to remove a stringent requirement of years of experience in a directly related job as a filter for candidates.

• Capitalize on internships. Employers overwhelmingly believe internships yield higher return on investment than any other strategy for recruiting new hires, and interns tend to convert to full-time faster and stay longer than other candidates.²¹ Internships also deliver major benefits to workers: Completing an internship while in school substantially reduces the risk of long-term underemployment.²² Take advantage of the proliferation of solutions providers such as Handshake and Podium Education,²³ which can help connect organizations with potential worker-learners. Internships should be paid to ensure a broad and inclusive talent pool.

• Reconsider apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are long-term relationships between a student worker and an organization. While apprenticeships can have substantial early costs, research shows they typically are profitable investments for organizations and workers.²⁴ In Switzerland, apprenticeships are used in a range of industries and professions, including banking, retail, and IT.²⁵ They are on the rise elsewhere, expanding to include “higher apprenticeships”²⁶ that provide degree-like accreditation and target knowledge work. For example, the UK’s National Health Service has partnered with a number of universities to create a pathway to becoming a doctor via apprenticeship rather than through traditional education.²⁷

Intel,²⁸ TSMC²⁹ and other semiconductor companies are expanding apprenticeship programs to address the sector’s growing talent shortage. As part of Australia’s Industry 4.0 initiative, Siemens has partnered with Swinburne University to pilot and scale an apprenticeship program in which students work on real industry projects, gain practical experience, and earn an associate degree.³⁰The combination of academic learning and practical experience helps apprentices learn to navigate the rapidly changing technology landscape, making them more resilient and versatile in their careers.³¹

• Partner with higher education. Cooperative education and work-integrated learning programs combine periods of classroom instruction at educational institutions with paid, discipline-related work experience at organizations. Schools such as Northeastern University (United States), University of Waterloo (Canada), and Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) are rising in popularity because they offer opportunities to gain experience while learning.³²

Our 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey found that learning and development was the talent process most in need of reinvention due to AI-related disruption in work. Reinventing learning and development will take more than new methods or tools; it will require organizations to rethink where they focus workforce development and why.

Organizations can take a whole work approach to development by integrating skill-building with practical, contextual experience, thereby helping workers build judgment and adaptability.

Consider the following approaches for development.

• Upskill in context. As in the Medtronic example above, workers can develop skills for and within the context of target roles, so they can directly apply what they learn.
• Create micro-opportunities to develop judgment. Provide less-experienced workers with controlled environments where they can make decisions and practice judgment, such as through talent marketplaces and in digital playgrounds (safe digital environments in which people can practice and play).³³ Targeting specific skills in context can be an effective way to frame talent marketplace gigs for greater impact,³⁴ and including reflective learning moments helps lock in the benefits.³⁵
• Work closely with managers. Managers may continue to be the biggest proponents of experience requirements through hiring practices, and they are overwhelmed. Our research shows that managers spend just 13% of their time, on average, on tasks such as hiring and onboarding. Yet managers should play a critical role in accelerating the sharing of tacit knowledge and gaining experience.

Closing the experience gap by reimagining work

Reimagining the work itself—especially the ways humans and machines can work together—may offer effective solutions to bridge the experience gap.

Leaders can start by redesigning roles to enable workers to practice judgment and accelerate experience over time. The following strategies can encourage workers to exercise judgment and gain work experience.

• Design for gateways and possible future paths. Recent research by Guild found that organizations often have too few steppingstone roles where junior staff can grow into fully experienced talent.³⁶ Trends toward flattening and hollowing out of organizations may exacerbate the problem. To overcome this challenge, organizations can design individual roles with developmental pathways in mind. Some organizations are taking this approach already, intentionally bringing back roles designed to be feeders for critical positions. Organizations also might consider assigning some tasks to people instead of automating them to capitalize on the work’s long-term developmental benefits. They should avoid creating entry-level roles comprised of only undesirable tasks or lacking obvious progression opportunities.
• Design for teams. Scope roles based on the experience required for the whole team, and construct teams made up of people with varying types and degrees of experience. One theme that emerged from interviews for this year’s report was the effectiveness of pairing novices with experts. For example, BMW found that mixed teams outperformed others, as more-experienced workers contributed wisdom and less-experienced workers brought fresh perspectives.³⁷

AI, when used responsibly, can also be integrated into the design of work and roles to help workers gain experience. Technological disruption is part of the cause behind diminishing low-experience roles in organizations. AI also can be part of the solution. Organizations can use AI to:

• Harvest tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the unwritten, intuitive pattern recognition for work in context.³⁸ It is a big part of experienced workers’ advantage. But tacit knowledge is hard to capture, in part because people often struggle to know why or how they know what they know. It is typically transferred through person-to-person social interactions, with attempts to capture and transfer it via technology largely unsuccessful.³⁹ AI could change the equation with its ability to glean insights from large amounts of data at a scale and speed not possible for humans⁴⁰
• Supplement actions of less-experienced workers. Using AI agents to assist the work of humans can help less-experienced workers grow into their roles. Many organizations, including Amazon (see “Could AI be a team’s experienced veteran?”) and major banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank,⁴¹ are experimenting with AI tools not just to replace the synthesis work done by junior staff, but to augment it.
• Accelerate the development of conceptual frameworks. Experience provides conceptual frameworks workers can use to quickly evaluate new contexts. Although AI tools often are touted as sources of quick answers, nurses,⁴² teachers,⁴³ salespeople,⁴⁴ managers, and others are finding value from AI tools that ask questions. AI coaches and tutors can enhance the development of workers’ conceptual frameworks by offering personalized guidance, supporting reflection, and providing “extraheric” prompting⁴⁵—posing critical questions to stimulate deeper thinking and creativity. Early AI-related research suggests that AI’s impact on skilled worker performance is best when the AI tools encourage workers to exert “cognitive effort and judgment when working with AI” instead of simply adopting AI responses as given.⁴⁶

The path forward

The experience gap undermines organizations’ and workers’ ability to realize their potential. For organizations, a dearth of workers with the ability to apply their skills and human capabilities in different work contexts threatens to hamstring organizations’ ability to achieve business goals. This is especially true in the AI era, when people and technology have the potential to multiply each other’s value. For workers, a lack of foothold positions and clear career trajectories undermines their employability and other key aspects of human sustainability.

Leaders and executives today shouldn’t wait for higher education or government policy to solve this problem. And the longer they wait to address it, the more their talent pipelines are likely to wither, and the harder it will be to repair them. Fortunately, organizations have many options to close the experience gap. Those that proactively and intentionally unpack the components of the “years of experience” proxy can use a range of tools and strategies to reproduce them—positioning themselves and their people to deliver value to each other for years to come.