Experience or training?

In my Research and T&I as a Profession courses this question has come up a few times. 

As I see it, on the one hand, we can have very highly qualified graduates from respected academic institutions that have no experience despite their “practical training” in class. I am not saying that that training is negative or does not count. Unfortunately, no matter how much you try to reproduce real world conditions, it is not going to be the real thing for one main reason: you are in a classroom for educational/ training purposes, and you are going to be assessed accordingly, not by real world standards.

On the other hand, we have highly experienced professionals that had little or no training in the field, maybe because it was not available at their time, that are also excellent at their job.

And then, we have a wide variety of combinations of both in between these two extremes.

There are academic papers that make a robust defence of training as well as others defending experience. I will not cite any of them, but in most cases, there is a problem with the amount of quantitative or qualitative data, and sometimes even both. Sometimes they are plainly biased. My point of view is that you need a combination of both, but you cannot rule out anyone for lacking training if they are well experienced or experience if the have a solid training.

However, I have been hearing from many people that experience is not important at all. They argue that having a degree of training will not only compensate for but, have more weight than having experience.

Please excuse me: if you are going to tell me that my almost twenty years in the field (yes I’m old) account for nothing, I am sorry to tell you that you are wrong. We, people with experience (and also training,) know the ropes of the trade precisely because of our experience, and that is something no diploma or certificate can provide. It is something that comes with time and, of course, experience.

Of course, training is important, but it is not enough on its own.

I am not going to say there is a right amount of training or experience to make the perfect professional if there is such a thing. In my opinion, there are different optimal combinations for various positions, and we all need to find our niche. We are all different, and that is good.

So, what’s your take: experience or training? Both?