In consulting and professional services, it’s common to see requests for proposals ask for a specific number of years of experience.
Sometimes it’s five years. Sometimes ten. Sometimes more.
And on the surface, that makes perfect sense. Organizations want to know they are working with people who are credible, capable, and seasoned enough to navigate complexity well. But over the last couple of years, I’ve found myself reflecting more deeply on what we really mean when we talk about experience.
Are we measuring the age of a company? The tenure of a brand? Or the lived experience of the people actually doing the work?
Because those are not always the same thing.
An organization may have existed for decades, yet the team delivering the work may be relatively new, while a newer company may bring together individuals who each carry decades of experience from across industries and environments.
So how should we define experience?
True experience isn’t built in ideal conditions. It is built through navigating uncertainty, making difficult decisions, rebuilding trust after it has been broken, leading teams through change, and carrying accountability when the answers are not clear. It comes from moments where things went well, and moments where they absolutely did not (I appreciate that some of those moments for me serve me incredibly well in the work I do now).
Experience is built through difficult conversations. Through strategies that had to be revisited. Through leadership decisions that carried real risk. Through learning how to listen more carefully, communicate more clearly, and adapt more thoughtfully over time.
And perhaps most importantly, experience teaches judgment. Not textbook judgment. Human judgment. The kind that helps leaders recognize that every organization, every team, and every challenge is nuanced. The kind that reminds us that culture cannot simply be “implemented” through a framework, and that leadership rarely comes with perfect information.
Years matter. But what those years contain matters even more.
There is a significant difference between years spent repeating familiar patterns and years spent learning, evolving, leading, failing, rebuilding, and growing.
Expanding how we define experience also changes how we understand growth, contribution, leadership, and expertise in today’s workplace. Experience is not only built through time, but through navigating complexity, adapting to change, learning through challenge, and developing perspective and judgment along the way. In an environment where information and technical knowledge are increasingly accessible through AI and automation, these distinctly human capabilities – discernment, contextual understanding, emotional intelligence, and wisdom gained through lived experience – become even more valuable.
In consulting work, clients are not simply hiring a company name or a polished presentation. They are placing trust in the perspectives, judgment, and lived experiences of the individuals guiding the work. That kind of experience does not always show up neatly in a proposal response or a tagline.
And maybe that’s the point. Perhaps experience is best defined by the depth of perspective, humility, resilience, and wisdom the people within it bring to the work every day.
