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my interviewer said I lacked “real world work experience” — what does that mean? — Ask a Manager

April 5, 2021

A reader writes:

I’m a recent grad. All my work experience so far has been on-campus jobs such as tutoring or being an assistant in my department’s office.

Recently I was thrown off by a comment an interviewer made. I was being interviewed by the executive director and the marketing manager together. The marketing manager is who the open position directly reports to. The interview was going well, but the director began talking about how he was enjoying the conversation, but that he also didn’t feel I had a lot of real world work experience, and he essentially asked me to convince him of my worth/value.

In the moment, I was thrown off by his comment. I asked him to clarify what he meant by “real world work experience,” and he explained that he sees my “school experience” (which included the jobs I held on campus during my time as a student) but he wasn’t sure how it would transfer to the position they were hiring for. He then spoke about how the marketing manager has had experience in her industry and so forth, and he was wondering what I was bringing to the table.

Do folks not see jobs held on campus as “real world” work experience? Or what do they mean when they say that?

I understood he was having difficulty seeing how transferable (or relevant?) my skills were and although I was very glad I was able to clear up some concerns he had, the phrasing of “real world work experience” still strikes me. On the one hand, I can understand where he’s coming from. On the other hand, I felt like it invalidated any prior work experience I did have.

The rest of the interview went well and I was later offered the job, which I accepted, but I’ve been doing some reflecting on what “real world” work experience is and how employers gauge the value of potential employees. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, your interviewer was using “real world experience” to mean “not on campus.”

It’s not that jobs on campus aren’t part of the real world. Obviously you still exist in the real world when you’re in school. But campus jobs — and jobs designed for students generally — are often seen as cutting students more slack than they’d get normally. There’s something to that! In student jobs, you’re often able to call in at the last minute because you need to study for an exam or are able to take off the exact days you want to take off because of your school schedule. More importantly, you’re also often (although not always) held to a different standard of performance because you’re a student and so it’s assumed you’re still learning and figuring things out. Sometimes in student jobs, it’s much harder to get fired too; they figure you’re still learning, the stakes aren’t very high, and you’ll be gone at the end of the semester anyway.

That’s not the case in every student job. But it’s true of enough of them that some people will look at that experience and figure it might have been less rigorous than non-student work.

To be clear, there’s lots of value in that work anyway! It’s not like student jobs just don’t count. They count for a lot. But if I’m comparing a candidate whose work experience is all on-campus jobs as a student and a candidate who has, say, two years of post-college work experience, if all else is equal I’m going to assume the second candidate will probably need less guidance and less acclimation to the work world. That doesn’t mean the second candidate is stronger than the first; it’s one data point out of a whole bunch of things to consider.

Your interviewer’s language was sloppy, but that’s likely what he meant.

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