Emerging Voices: The Academia to Industry Pipeline: The Experience Dilemma

It’s the final year of your chemical engineering undergraduate education, and you finally sit down, open your laptop, and start combing through an abundance of job portals and company websites in search of your first job. You find a handful that interest you and decide to apply to them, but when you take a closer look at the requirements of the entry-level positions, a similar phrase sticks out on all of them: “3+ years of experience required.” Surely, your engineering lectures and lab courses can make up for the experience required, but to what extent? When it comes to fields in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, you may pass the preliminary round of interviews, but when asked if you have the technical experience required for their specific needs, you hit a dead end.

This seemingly innocuous line highlights a challenge that creates a Catch-22 situation for new graduates. “Everybody wants to hire somebody with three years’ experience, and nobody wants to give them three years’ experience,” according to Peter Cappelli, Director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.

The employer. From an employer’s standpoint, mandating three or more years of experience for entry-level positions makes sense. It is a risk-mitigation strategy ensuring that new hires can contribute from day one, minimizing disruption to workflows and controlling...