Why the agency(?) obsession with $industry experience?

[BolshieBastard]

In the vast majority of cases, its just agency bollocks about having previous experience in......

In my time, Id worked in utilities, finance, insurance and COTS etc. Sometimes in utilities you'd come across must have gas or electric or billing experience. Similarly in finance, must have corporate or retail banking, credit cards etc.

I know one sap who has been in pharma for the last 10 years. He tried moving sectors because AZ were moving all their stuff from Macclesfield down to Cambridge but couldnt. He'd been pigeon holed by agencies.

Utterly ridiculous most of the time.

[SueEllen]

Let's be frank here, this applies to all agents, all non-technical managers of which about 90% fall into this category.

The secret to sucess in this game is to get used to explaining space flight to four year olds without laughing or condensation.

Think you mean "condescension" rather than "condensation"

There is normal not understanding and there is the extreme thickness.

The younger ones tend to fall into the latter category.

[jjdarg]

I've even found having worked in the industry but not recently has had a client throw out my CV. This is the worst in investment banking (I once ran IT support for a bank in Frankfurt, supporting just about every conceivable business within, but that isn't considered relevant IB experience as it's not recent) and insurance (which is ironical, as insurance moves at a snail's pace and is mostly back office work which isn't all that much different from back office work in other industries).

It isn't the agents specifying it, it is the clients. I've been called by 8 different agents for one job, because you could have written the job spec from my CV, and when I was submitted, the client said I didn't have relevant industry experience.

I even had someone ring me about whether I had experience of what I do, but with smart metering; the client wasn't going to look at any CVs that did not have smart metering. I said to the agent, good luck with that, there might be 6 people in the country who have done that.