What a stressful word, I mean experience. The word experience gives me a headache not because I don’t understand its meaning but its connection with jobs. I take a pen and a paper to write an application letter for a job but experience stops me.

What the hell is this experience that is denying me a job! I am fed up with it. Apparently I have no experience, does this mean that I will never get any job in my life or could this be the reason why I am jobless now?

Recently I heard that there are job announcements in The New Times and without wasting any single second I precipitated to buy the newspaper to see whether I might find any job vacancy for me.

No sooner had I taken hold of the paper than I opened the actual page. As I was running through the posts indicated, I was impatient to find one that could suit my qualification.

Miraculously I found one, I sighed a sigh of relief not because I was tired of reading but having found what I wanted, talking to myself that finally my prayers are answered.

I took time now to read carefully the requirements and I met a statement that reads "you must be having at least three to five years of experience”, frankly speaking I tore off the paper into pieces.

I was really pissed off. Such kind of statement dashes the hopes of a job seeker notably the one without experience like me.

Imagine you have just finished your studies; you are busy looking for a job to see how you can build yourself and experience intervenes, how would you feel?

In all job opportunities you happen to encounter, they need experience then one wonders whether experience denotes working! 

How will I get this experience if I don’t start to work? In Kinyarwanda it is said "Nizibika zari amagi” which loosely translates that roosters were once eggs too.

This means in simple words that even an expert was once a beginner. You first work and in the process of working you gain experience so it does not come out of the blue. It is practice that makes perfect meaning that experience is a subset of work not the reverse.

It is not necessarily experience that gives the best output instead it is how well one is trained. If I am well trained for sure the job won’t fail me.

Experience should not be a reason to deprive people of jobs which they qualify for. Give them a platform to put into use the skills acquired from school, don’t make them dormant to the detriment of the society. 

According to my opinion, at times this so called experience is used as a pretext so that people feel discouraged and this gives employers a room to give jobs the person they want which is unfair.

Conclusively I would suggest that the employers should avail the opportunity to people who are in position to work so that even the experience we are talking about will be gained in due course otherwise we are not rendering any help to our new generation of workers.

email: franciskalimba@yahoo.com