Do you consider yourself technical? What about peers in other roles? How does your perception of someone’s technical experience influence your behavior? We often refer to certain roles as “technical”, but everyone has a variety of experience and deep specialty. Despite our best intentions to treat everyone equal we may unconsciously discriminate against others based on our assumptions of their technical experience. This can result in unfairly modifying our interactions with certain roles, when quite likely coworkers in all roles could benefit from breadth and detail in our conversation.

During this talk, learn how to recognize and modify your experience bias to improve performance and morale.

• Explore how the human brain instinctively attempts to categorize people, potentially leading to bias.
• Debunk common myths such as “left vs right” brain that are often used to justify technical discrimination.
• Gain a better understanding of how perceived discrimination negatively impacts performance.
• Learn how bias blind spot may hide one’s awareness of technical experience bias.
• Examine how other professions such as medicine are struggling with technical experience bias and learn how they are adapting to ultimately provide better patient care.
• Explore real world steps you can practice to help minimize technical experience bias in your interactions.

Learn from two associates in roles with drastically different technical perceptions, one focused on project management and business intelligence and one focused software development and operations. Explore how each have altered their behavior to better engage and respect peers in all roles with different technical experience backgrounds.