Why Experience Alone Cannot Build a Profession

Experience holds a place of high importance in the field of security.

Almost all aspects of security practice value experience because it reflects exposure, knowledge, and competence. Security professionals who have had several years to operate in a complex environment will be well-equipped with situational awareness, good judgement, competence, and confidence in handling uncertainty.

These skills are invaluable.

After all, some of the most renowned security professionals gained their reputation from years of experience in the field.

However, while experience is vital for professional success, one should take note of its limitations.

Experience can develop security professionals.

Experience is not capable of building a profession.

It is this very difference that serves as the basis for most discussions on security professionalization today.

Is it the value of experience?

In truth, the question at hand is whether experience alone is sufficient to build the foundation of a recognized profession.

Experience Is Valuable—But It Is Not a Professional Framework

Experience plays a major role in building professional capacity.

Real-world environments provide exposure to situations which cannot necessarily be mimicked by education or training processes.

Through experience, the professional learns how to understand new situations, how to respond to events, how to communicate under pressure, how to identify potential threats, and how to exercise judgment in uncertain situations.

This is a significant lesson.

It can influence a practitioner’s way of thinking, decision-making, and risk perception.

Yet, experience is, by definition, personal.

It does not belong to organizations, but to individuals.

Individuals have different experiences because of their particular surroundings, environments, organizational cultures, and operational conditions. This makes experience inherently variable.

It is possible for two individuals both to have twenty years’ worth of experience and yet to have reached completely different levels of professional competence.

While one individual might have had twenty years of rich and varied experience with an emphasis on learning and improvement, another individual might have performed the same operations repeatedly for twenty years without ever gaining further professional insight.

Years of experience tell us nothing.

Why Professions Cannot Depend on Individual Knowledge

One of the hallmarks of professional maturity is that professionals are not dependent on the knowledge possessed by individual professionals alone.

Professionals instead establish ways of storing, organizing, communicating, and enhancing their knowledge across the generations.

An example of this can be provided by medicine.

Professional medicine is based not only on the experiences of individual physicians. Clinical experience is important but needs to be set into the context of medical science, professional training, peer review, ethics, specialization, and professional development.

Engineering and the legal profession are no exception.

Professional experience is highly valued but is not sufficient for creating the institutional legitimacy of professionals.

In this case, the knowledge base of the profession is shared by the whole profession.

The experience gained by one generation enters the body of knowledge possessed by the profession as a whole.

This was not always true for security.

Security still faces the problem of institutionalizing its experience.

Much experience is still associated only with certain individuals or organizations and does not enter the general body of professional knowledge.

In this situation, there is a danger that professional experience can be lost with the passing of the expert.

The Difference Between Experience and Professional Knowledge

Experience and professional knowledge are quite similar but different in nature.

Experience is the result of being exposed to circumstances, conditions, and tasks.

Professional knowledge is defined by organized, verified, distributed, and embedded knowledge within the larger profession.

This difference is crucial.

A practitioner with a lot of experience will have many ideas and insights that can improve the effectiveness of operations.

Yet, if these insights have not been organized, written down, verified, and distributed to a broader professional community, then they still constitute personal knowledge, not professional knowledge.

The profession moves forward because experience turns into collective learning.

Personal insight turns into standards.

Personal understanding turns into doctrine.

Personal insights turn into recognized knowledge.

In this way, the profession is able to advance beyond any single individual.

Why Mature Professions Institutionalise Learning

One of the factors leading to the increased legitimacy of mature professions has been their ability to create mechanisms for institutionalizing the process of learning.

Knowledge in the professional context is not an accident.

It can be assured through:

• education systems
• professional standards
• competence standards
• research and scholarship
• governance structures
• professional development

 

In this way, professional development is no longer dependent on mere personal experiences.

Instead, it becomes available, transferable, and improvable.

Thus, there is consistency.

There will be recognized criteria in terms of competency, accountability, authority, and professionalism.

And security is also becoming aware of its need for such structures.

With the widening scope of security responsibilities to include intelligence, behavior, organizational resilience, infrastructure security, and risk management, it becomes inadequate to depend only on personal experiences.

Experience Without Structure Creates Fragmentation

The other disadvantage of experience-led development is fragmentation.

If professional development is focused on experience, then professional development can be fragmented based on local organisational cultures rather than on established professional standards.

Organisations have different methods to learn from experience.

Diverse sectors put emphasis on different areas.

Varied jurisdictions place varied expectations.

All this leads to the fragmentation of professional development, which brings problems for:

• competence assessment

• career advancement

• professional mobility

• governance uniformity

• professional identity

This phenomenon has been characteristic of the development of the security sector for a long time.

Experience provides invaluable skills, but does not necessarily bring unity.

Professions need an organizational mechanism that would connect skills with professional development.

Professional Pathways Transform Experience into Expertise

The question for security is therefore not whether experience counts.

It does.

The question is how experience can be incorporated into professional development.

A mature profession addresses the problem by way of a pathway approach.

Experience is simply one element among several others, including education, competency assurance, governance, ethical accountability, and pathways.

Professional development is no longer accidental but intentional.

Practitioners advance along a path of increasing levels of responsibility, based on clear expectations and standards.

Experience leads to expertise.

Professional pathways convert expertise into professionalism.

This difference might well matter more and more as security continues its journey towards greater professionalism.

The Future of Security Professionalisation

Professionalization's future will certainly rely on the sector's capacity to integrate experience with structure.

Experience will continue to be important.

But professions do not survive on the basis of experience.

Professions survive on the basis of structures that safeguard and maintain knowledge, skills, authority, and development from one generation to another of professionals.

Security is an industry that works in contexts where good judgment, cross-disciplinary knowledge, and strategy making are increasingly needed.

These are things that experience does not suffice for.

They need professional structuring.

In its further evolution, the problem may not necessarily be of lacking experience.

The problem may be of having the structures to convert experience into professionalism.

Conclusion

Experience is still one of the most important assets in the security sector.

Experience enhances judgement, develops practical knowledge and contributes greatly to professional skills.

However, experience alone is not enough to create a profession.

Experience belongs to people.

Professions rely on systems.

Professions need to have a way of organizing knowledge, measuring competence, exercising authority, facilitating career development and retaining professional expertise.

That’s why experienced professions are interested both in experience and in education, governance, standards, competence frameworks and professionalization programs.

Security has also been confronted with the same dilemma.

In the future, the professionalization process may not only be about how many experiences people acquire, but rather in what way they transform those experiences into knowledge and professional skills.

Experience produces professionals.

Systems produce professions.