“At least three years of experience” and “Five years of experience with…” appear in thousands of job postings. Experience is often regarded as an objective measure of a candidate’s competence.
But five years of experience tells us only one thing for certain: Five years have passed.
Written by: Carsten Lassen, CEO, and Mille Frydensberg, Director of Business Services, Specialisterne Danmark
Research assistant: Lukas Permin
The number of years someone has worked does not necessarily tell us how much a candidate has learned along the way – the complexity of the problems they have solved, the level of responsibility they have taken on, or how quickly they have been able to turn new knowledge into practice.
Yet years of experience are often used as a concrete criterion for whether a candidate is even considered for a position – even as the first filter.
We were curious to find out just how widespread this practice actually is.
So we reviewed 500 Danish IT and tech job postings across five different job categories. Of the 500 postings, 193 – 38.6% – included an experience requirement expressed in years. In 153 postings, the requirement was stated as a specific number of years, while another 40 used phrases such as “several years of experience”.
And one number came up particularly often.
Why five years?
Of the 153 postings that specified a particular number of years, 60 required five years of experience.
Which raises an obvious question: What exactly happens between year four and year five?
Of course, this may be a well-founded requirement. In some roles, it takes time to develop good judgment, a sense of responsibility, and specialized knowledge.
But I suspect that in many cases, five years becomes a convenient shorthand for something that is much harder to describe.
Perhaps the company is looking for someone who can work independently, understand complex problems, make sound decisions, understand business needs, and turn knowledge into results.
It is much easier to write “at least five years of experience”.
The problem is that those two things are not the same.
One person may spend five years constantly being challenged, learning new technologies, taking on greater responsibility, and solving increasingly complex problems.
Another may spend the same five years doing roughly the same type of work.
In both cases, the résumé will say five years of experience. Time becomes a proxy for quality.
The problem arises when that number becomes a gatekeeper.
Not everyone follows the typical learning curve
At Specialisterne, we work with autistic and other neurodivergent people. Among them, we meet individuals with particularly strong abilities in areas such as deep focus, systematic thinking, pattern recognition, and analysis. We meet people who have had to adapt to a traditional education system and can demonstrate creative, out of the box thinking, ability to work on dynamic teams, and collaborate with a variety of types of thinkers.
And when strong cognitive abilities are combined with motivation and the right environment, the learning curve can look very different from the one we tend to assume.
Christoffer is a good example.
When we matched him with Danske Bank, he had no experience with PL/1 or mainframe technology. However, he had a background in physics, strong analytical skills, and a proven ability to quickly understand complex systems.
Within a year, he was performing at a senior level.
In a traditional résumé screening process, Christoffer probably would not have been considered for the job. He would have been rejected based on his lack of experience before anyone had assessed what he was actually capable of.
Christoffer illustrates the real problem with our fascination with years of experience.
It is not that we may occasionally overestimate an experienced candidate.
Rather with competency based recruitment, we may lose the opportunity to discover the potential in those who can develop differently.
Experience is not worthless
Obviously, there is value in having faced difficult situations, seen projects go wrong, taken responsibility, and lived with the consequences of your decisions. That kind of judgement can be difficult to develop without real experience.
But years of experience and experience itself are not the same.
And experience and competence are certainly not the same.
Given that 38.6% of the 500 job postings we examined list experience as part of the job requirements, it is worth asking:
Are we measuring what is easy to measure rather than what we actually want to know?
Because the hiring company rarely needs “five years of experience” in itself.
It needs someone who can do the job.
We should spend less time asking how long a candidate has been working with a particular technology, and more time examining how quickly the person learns, what level of complexity they can handle, what they have actually created, and how quickly new knowledge can be turned into value.
Because a résumé can tell us something about a person’s history—it just does not necessarily tell us how skilled that person is.
How we conducted the review
Specialisterne reviewed 500 Danish IT and tech job postings, with 100 postings in each of the following categories:
- Software Development
- Data / BI / Analytics
- Infrastructure / Cloud / Security
- IT Project & Product
- Other IT specialist roles
For each posting, we recorded whether the employer included an experience requirement expressed in years.
A posting was classified as having a years-of-experience requirement if it specified a particular number of years – for example, “3 years of experience”, “minimum five years” or “5+ years” – or used wording such as “several years” or “a few years”.
Phrases such as “relevant experience”, “solid experience” or “experience from a similar role” were not classified as years-of-experience requirements unless a number of years was also specified.
Where a range was given, such as “3–5 years of experience”, we recorded the minimum requirement.
Results: 193 of the 500 postings – 38.6% – included an experience requirement expressed in years. Of these, 153 specified a concrete numerical requirement, while 40 used a non-numerical requirement referring to multiple years of experience. Five years was the most common specific requirement, appearing in 60 of the 153 postings that specified a number of years.
The review shows how common years-of-experience requirements were within the sample analyzed. It does not examine the relationship between years of experience and actual job performance.
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