This month I am happy to welcome back blog author, Amy Gittoes. Her subject ‘Experience Matters’ is something that I think will resonate with many of you.  It certainly does with me.  I will let you get started on your reading. This fine piece of writing from an interesting angle that I found refreshing to read. I won’t hold you up, just head straight to it.  And thank you to Amy for the contribution.

It’s often said that people don’t choose refrigeration as a career. They arrive in it. That was certainly true for me. After graduating, I volunteered to help out at Arctic Circle. There wasn’t a long-term plan behind it, or a clear sense of where it might lead. It was simply an opportunity to get involved in something practical, to learn, and to gain a bit of experience. What I didn’t expect at the time was that it would turn into a career.

Like many people in this industry, what began as a temporary step gradually became something more permanent. And as that happened, my understanding of the industry began to shift.

From the outside, refrigeration can appear quite narrowly defined. Technical, process-driven, and largely focused on equipment and performance. But the longer you spend in it, the more you realise how interconnected it really is. Decisions made within refrigeration don’t sit in isolation. They link into energy use, environmental impact, regulatory pressures, commercial constraints, and long-term system performance. In other words, it’s an industry that operates within a much wider system.

It’s that complexity that has led me to reflect more on the way we think about experience, and how much weight we give it. There is a strong culture within the industry of valuing time served. It’s often one of the first indicators of credibility. Conversations can quickly turn to how long someone has been involved, or at what stage they entered the field. It’s not unusual to hear comparisons framed around years, almost as a shorthand for depth of understanding.

And that largely makes sense. Experience builds practical knowledge. It develops instinct. It allows people to recognise patterns and avoid mistakes that aren’t obvious from the outside.

I’ve worked with people who have been in this industry for decades, and the depth of knowledge they bring is something you simply can’t replicate quickly. There’s a level of instinct and understanding that only comes from time, and it’s something I’ve learnt a huge amount from.

But there is a point at which experience can also begin to shape how problems are seen, and how solutions are approached. If most people in a room have followed similar paths into the industry, learned within the same structures, and been exposed to the same assumptions, then over time their thinking can begin to align. Not because they lack capability, but because they have been shaped by similar experiences.

That alignment can be valuable. It creates consistency and shared understanding. But it can also limit the range of perspectives that are brought to more complex challenges. And those challenges are becoming broader and more interconnected. Balancing sustainability with cost. Navigating changing regulations. Integrating new technologies into existing systems. Managing growing pressures around energy security, environmental impact and infrastructure resilience. These are not problems with single, obvious answers. They involve competing priorities, uncertain conditions, and ethical questions about long term environmental, commercial and societal impact. They require judgement, and often a willingness to question existing approaches.

I’ve also seen the opposite, people coming into the industry from completely different backgrounds, asking questions that shift how a problem is understood entirely. Not because they know less, but because they aren’t working from the same set of assumptions. It is in that space, somewhere between experience and alternative thinking, that the most interesting thinking tends to happen.

My own route into the industry sits slightly outside of the traditional path. My academic background is in Philosophy, which is not an obvious starting point for a career in refrigeration, and is often used as an example in the wider debate around so-called “Mickey Mouse” degrees. There is, of course, no direct link between studying philosophy and specifying refrigeration systems. But what that education did provide was a particular way of approaching problems.

·         A tendency to question assumptions rather than accept them.

·         An emphasis on evidence and reasoning.

·         An awareness that there is often more than one way to understand a situation.

Perhaps most significantly, it introduced a distinction between what can be done and what should be done.

That distinction might seem abstract, but in practice it becomes highly relevant. When decisions involve trade-offs between cost, performance, sustainability, and long-term impact, they are not purely technical. They require judgement about priorities, risks, and outcomes. Approaching those decisions from different angles can change not only the answers that are reached, but the questions that are asked in the first place.

This is not an argument for one route into the industry over another. Technical expertise, apprenticeships, and hands-on experience remain essential, they underpin everything we do. However, if experience is treated as the sole or dominant measure of value, there is a risk that other forms of contribution are overlooked. In particular, the contribution that comes from different ways of thinking. Where that kind of thinking isn’t given space, the risk isn’t a lack of expertise. It’s that we continue to approach new challenges with the same answers we’ve always had.

Refrigeration does not operate in isolation. It exists within a wider system that includes environmental policy, evolving technologies, commercial pressures, and changing customer expectations. Responding effectively to that level of complexity requires more than technical competence alone. It requires diversity in how problems are approached.

This has implications for how we think about diversity within the industry. While much of the focus has rightly been on improving representation, there is also a broader point to consider. Diversity is not only about who is present, but about the range of perspectives that are included in decision-making. An industry facing complex, system-level challenges is unlikely to benefit from uniform ways of thinking, regardless of how experienced those individuals may be. Instead, it is more likely to benefit from a combination of deep experience and varied perspectives.

Which brings the discussion back to where value is placed. If value continues to be closely tied to time served, then the industry may find itself reinforcing existing patterns. If, however, there is greater recognition of the role that different perspectives play, then there is more potential for change. Experience remains important, It always will. But on its own, it is not enough to meet the challenges the industry is now facing.