The role of experience in continuous learning skill
requirements also needs to be considered. To the extent
that one has greater experience with a set of job tasks or
content dimensions, they are less ‘‘new’’ and less challenging—the
person has been doing them for a longer time.
Therefore, they are less developmental, because the person
has had a chance to master them. Job performance is
related to the amount of experience one has on the job
(Schmidt et al. 1986). Therefore, if a person performs work
that requires continuous learning, but has been doing the
work for a long time, it is possible that he/she will not need
to engage in learning to the same extent as an inexperienced
person. Alternatively, a more experienced person
may know the work in greater detail and may recognize the
need for continuous learning in order to be an effective
performer on the various components of the work (e.g., the
more you know, the more you realize you don’t know).
Therefore, as in the case of age described earlier, while the
present study examined the relationship between experience
and reported continuous learning skill demands, the
direction of the relationship is uncertain based upon prior
literature and logic, and therefore a directional hypothesis
was not offered