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Career progression
A friend in search of a job in a field somewhat related to my career path recently posted that they are looking for a new job. They described themselves as "mid-career" in their field with ~2 years of job experience and ~1 year of education. This irked me, in a lot of ways.
Now, don't get me wrong, this person is very good at what they do. I'd be comfortable handing them a specific problem in their field of choice and expecting a competent solution. But competence-in-field isn't the defining factor of where someone is in their career.
The problem here isn't specific to this person, but to a collection of large sub-industries where there has long been an ongoing inflation of job role adjectives.
In my experience, jobs in fields related to mine go from "Entry Level" to "Junior" to "Senior" over the span of a decade or two. This person's wording and my conversation with them suggests that there might be a "mid-career" or adjective-less level between junior and senior, which I'm mostly ok with. What I have a problem with is the time it might take to get to that level. In my mind, someone with <5 years of experience in a tech related field is still, at best, "Junior".
This inflation leads to confusion at the top and bottom ends of the scale. If you think you can get non-entry-level positions with no job experience, that explains why internet-meme-writing people with six months of experience think they are over-qualified for entry level positions. If you've skipped "entry level" and gone from "junior" to [not-junior] in two years, and think you'll be "senior" soon, then what label do you use five years after that? Fifteen?
This isn't about competency in the core of the field. You could be at the top of your class with all of the theoretical knowledge in the world, and you'd still be looking at "Entry Level" positions. The advancement through a career in any industry, particularly tech industries, includes all of the other stuff that happens in those intervening years.
Example: If someone told me they were a senior auto mechanic, but then said they had never touched a car with metric fasteners, I'd be very dubious. I wouldn't insist that they had training on such, but the idea that they could make it through enough practical experience to label themselves as "senior" without even accidentally running into at least one such vehicle would be a huge red flag.
Example: The best programmer in the world might still be "junior" level if they haven't ever done any systems architecture, haven't been exposed to data structure and algorithm complexity concepts, haven't installed/updated their own development tools, etc. These are all things that a programmer doesn't necessarily need to be trained in, but which they would almost certainly incidentally encounter over months or years of time on the job.
Example: A system admin doesn't need to be trained in desktop support. They might not want to do it, and it might not come up very often. You could make it through a two year college curriculum on linux or unix system adminstration without ever touching a windows desktop computer. And yet, if you tell me that you're a senior sysadmin, I expect that at some point in the last ten years you've had to figure out how to get troubleshooting info out of one of your users' desktop mail/web/whatever clients. That, and a thousand other things that come up once a year or even once a decade, are part of a cloud of things the majority of which I expect a senior level person to have, purely through on the job experience, not necessarily through any training or practice.
Additionally, those years of experience include something that you almost can't get from training; They let you live through industry changes. No matter how good you are with today's cars, languages, or servers, you're going to have to adapt on the job as things change over the next years or decades. Maybe one of those big changes comes tomorrow. How do I know you're capable of rolling with that? I know because you've already done so, in some other big change that happened five or ten years ago. If you've only been in the field for a couple of years, I can't know that about you, and that factor is another part of being not-junior, or reaching the middle of your career.
So, in summary... No one with 1 year of school and 2 years of experience is "mid-career", no matter how good they are at their job.
Unless they are a rabbit.
Now, don't get me wrong, this person is very good at what they do. I'd be comfortable handing them a specific problem in their field of choice and expecting a competent solution. But competence-in-field isn't the defining factor of where someone is in their career.
The problem here isn't specific to this person, but to a collection of large sub-industries where there has long been an ongoing inflation of job role adjectives.
In my experience, jobs in fields related to mine go from "Entry Level" to "Junior" to "Senior" over the span of a decade or two. This person's wording and my conversation with them suggests that there might be a "mid-career" or adjective-less level between junior and senior, which I'm mostly ok with. What I have a problem with is the time it might take to get to that level. In my mind, someone with <5 years of experience in a tech related field is still, at best, "Junior".
This inflation leads to confusion at the top and bottom ends of the scale. If you think you can get non-entry-level positions with no job experience, that explains why internet-meme-writing people with six months of experience think they are over-qualified for entry level positions. If you've skipped "entry level" and gone from "junior" to [not-junior] in two years, and think you'll be "senior" soon, then what label do you use five years after that? Fifteen?
This isn't about competency in the core of the field. You could be at the top of your class with all of the theoretical knowledge in the world, and you'd still be looking at "Entry Level" positions. The advancement through a career in any industry, particularly tech industries, includes all of the other stuff that happens in those intervening years.
Example: If someone told me they were a senior auto mechanic, but then said they had never touched a car with metric fasteners, I'd be very dubious. I wouldn't insist that they had training on such, but the idea that they could make it through enough practical experience to label themselves as "senior" without even accidentally running into at least one such vehicle would be a huge red flag.
Example: The best programmer in the world might still be "junior" level if they haven't ever done any systems architecture, haven't been exposed to data structure and algorithm complexity concepts, haven't installed/updated their own development tools, etc. These are all things that a programmer doesn't necessarily need to be trained in, but which they would almost certainly incidentally encounter over months or years of time on the job.
Example: A system admin doesn't need to be trained in desktop support. They might not want to do it, and it might not come up very often. You could make it through a two year college curriculum on linux or unix system adminstration without ever touching a windows desktop computer. And yet, if you tell me that you're a senior sysadmin, I expect that at some point in the last ten years you've had to figure out how to get troubleshooting info out of one of your users' desktop mail/web/whatever clients. That, and a thousand other things that come up once a year or even once a decade, are part of a cloud of things the majority of which I expect a senior level person to have, purely through on the job experience, not necessarily through any training or practice.
Additionally, those years of experience include something that you almost can't get from training; They let you live through industry changes. No matter how good you are with today's cars, languages, or servers, you're going to have to adapt on the job as things change over the next years or decades. Maybe one of those big changes comes tomorrow. How do I know you're capable of rolling with that? I know because you've already done so, in some other big change that happened five or ten years ago. If you've only been in the field for a couple of years, I can't know that about you, and that factor is another part of being not-junior, or reaching the middle of your career.
So, in summary... No one with 1 year of school and 2 years of experience is "mid-career", no matter how good they are at their job.
Unless they are a rabbit.
no subject
'"mid-career" in their field with ~2 years of job experience and ~1 year of education' ~ I'm Shocked! Shocked! I tell you.
Before I quit IT, I was in it for 20 years, the last three as a NOC Engineer...and even then I only considered myself just entering the Junior level of IT careers...