Sara
Have you ever seen an advertisement for a company that has “100 years” (or some other large number) of combined experience?
Have you ever thought about what that means?
The company is probably hoping that you’ll subconsciously think the business is 100 years old. After all, multigenerational companies do tend to accumulate some expertise.
But what they’re actually saying is this employee has five years of experience, this one has ten, and someone else over there has twenty, and so on until the total reaches 100.
For a law firm with two or three lawyers, that could mean that they have quite a few years of experience apiece, or one lawyer is very experienced and another is fairly new. Either way, that’s not bad for the company as a whole.
But the more employees you include in this average, the more meaningless this number becomes. How many years of experience do America’s largest retail corporations bring to the table if you factor in hundreds of thousands of employees?
Walmart has 2.2 million associates worldwide and 1.5 million in the US. Let’s go worldwide. The average tenure length is 3.3 years, so that’s 7.2 million years of experience.
Costco employs over 254,000 people with an average tenure of nine years each. Simple multiplication gives us a total experience of 2,286,000 years.
Costco actually has a high percentage of employees who have been there longer than ten years, but they still can’t beat the combined experience of Walmart’s larger workforce.
When it comes down to it, you have a higher chance of interacting with a more experienced employee at Costco than at Walmart. So what does ‘combined experience’ really mean?
Like most advertising concepts, it’s designed to create an impression that may or may not represent reality. Whether employees at Costco or Walmart are more experienced and helpful doesn’t correlate to the company’s combined experience in years.
The takeaway? Always check the number of employees they’re factoring into the number. Individual experience can make more difference than a number averaged out into meaninglessness. No matter how many years of experience a given employee or company has, the best ‘experience’ for an employee to have is experience using great customer service skills and a willingness to learn.
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