The Hidden Gap Between Experience and Expertise

By SIOP Member Chia-Lin Ho

Have you ever been told by recruiters or hiring managers that your experience in [xyz] is “less than what the job requires,” or that your experience leading others is “quite limited for this leadership role”?

Have you heard people say, “S/he has decades of experience in this field, so s/he must be an expert,” or use similar logic to assert their own expertise?

How do you feel when you hear statements like these?

Research indicates that work experience is a complex construct—one that includes quantitative and qualitative dimensions and requires a temporal perspective. The fact that learning from experience is not automatic is well documented in research, yet it remains poorly recognized in practice.

People in roles with highly repetitive tasks may learn very little, or nothing new, even after decades, especially if they aren’t curious about the broader purpose of their work or don’t take time to improve their processes based on natural feedback from the task or from others.

In contrast, individuals with much shorter tenure can learn more about the work, the organization, and themselves when they are intentional about their development and set clear goals for what they want to learn from the start.

Put simply: Years on the job don’t automatically translate into expertise. It’s the quality of experience—not the duration—combined with deliberate practice that drives expertise development.

In the leadership development space, experiential exercises, whether through challenging work assignments or offsite activities, have long dominated as a preferred learning strategy. It is often viewed as more powerful than top‑down approaches such as classroom learning, workshops, or reading about effective leadership. However, research shows that the assumed learning and skill acquisition from experience do not necessarily occur, nor do they reliably translate into more effective leader behaviors or improved business outcomes.

Setting aside the competing demands of performance versus mastery in challenging work assignments, people engaged in experiential leadership development often face three core issues:

• They may not be sufficiently aware of what they are actually learning.
• Even when they are aware, they may not have a clear understanding of precisely what they have learned.
• They may gain insights, but those insights may never translate into action.

The difficulties of learning from experience are further complicated by personal factors, such as self‑confidence.

Research points to an inverted‑U relationship between self‑confidence and the learning‑related processes of curiosity and openness. When self‑confidence is too low, curiosity shuts down because insecurity makes exploration feel risky or threatening. Conversely, when self‑confidence is excessively high, individuals tend to become incurious, assuming they already possess most of the relevant knowledge and skills.

This dynamic is especially relevant in leadership. Exaggerated self‑confidence, rising to the level of arrogance or an inflated sense of self‑importance, has been repeatedly noted as a recurring theme in leadership failures and the dark side of leadership. Leaders who overestimate their competence often miss critical feedback, overlook learning opportunities, and misinterpret their experiences in ways that limit growth.

Once something is learned, it is deliberate practice—combined with deep reflection on one’s experiences and the feedback received—that turns learning into the development of expertise. Expertise is fundamentally a function of the amount of deliberate practice accumulated over time. Scholars have noted that it typically takes a minimum of 10 years or roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach expert status in a given field.

A key element of expertise development is engaging in new challenges that push individuals beyond their current level of performance, ideally within a supportive environment that offers timely, high‑quality feedback. In deliberate practice, regular reflection on feedback, whether from the task itself or from others, helps extract insights from experience, build increasingly sophisticated mental models, and inform further experimentation and the next meaningful experience.

This cycle of experience → reflection → conceptualization → deliberate practice constitutes the integrated process of effective experiential learning.

In sum, experience alone does not guarantee learning or capability development. Expertise development is a function of experience, personal factors, deliberate practice, and reflections on feedback. Without intentionally designing, or actively seeking, experiences that align with one’s personal attributes, engaging in deep reflection, practicing deliberately over time, and having mechanisms that provide immediate, high‑quality feedback, work experience becomes little more than history on a résumé. Likewise, experiential programs in leadership development risk becoming merely edu‑taining activities that fall short of their developmental promise.

What can individuals and organizations do to turn experiences into true development and expertise?

• Understand your or your talent’s natural tendencies, strengths, overused strengths, areas for improvement, and blind spots through psychometrically sound personality assessments and multi‑rater leadership assessments (or high‑quality feedback gathered through non‑administrative, unbiased multi‑rater mechanisms)
• Explore and identify your or your talent’s developmental goals—those that go beyond the annual performance objectives you submit into your company’s talent system
• Intentionally design, or actively seek, experiences that align with your or your talent’s personal attributes and developmental goals
• Engage in regular, deep reflection and document it—ideally guided by a coach in a safe, non‑judgmental space
• Practice new behaviors and skills deliberately, with a realistic plan that fits your work and life and includes at least one accountability partner
• Design work and learning experiences and climates that maximize the quality and frequency of feedback, and that treat mistakes as opportunities for growth rather than signs of personal inadequacy

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About the Author

Dr. Chia-Lin Ho is an ICF certified executive coach and organizational psychologist at 3G Leadership Solutions. For more than 20 years, she has helped Fortune 500 companies develop their talent and measure the impact of their leadership development initiatives, while partnering with leaders at all levels to unlock their leadership potential. She specializes in helping executives in biopharma gain stakeholder buy-in, accelerate their transition into new roles, and build high performing teams. She continues to speak, write, and conduct research on leadership development, talent assessment, and impact measurement.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology or its affiliates.

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