We explain what inexperience is, how it differs from imprudence and negligence, and various examples.
What is incompetence?
Inexperience is the lack of expertise when doing something, that is, is the lack of wisdom, practice, experience or skill. If someone performs an action inexperiencedly, it means that they do it without being well prepared for it, either because they lack the knowledge, practice or skill necessary to do it correctly.
Therefore, things done with inexperience usually go wrong or, at least, not the way they were expected to turn out.
The term incompetence comes from Latin imperitiavoice constructed from the negative prefix in- and of peritus (“proven” or “specialist”).
Therefore, inexperience would be more or less synonymous with inexperience, inability or ignorance. It is a term widely used in legal and administrative language: in civil law, for example, actions committed negligently usually lead to financial compensation for the injured party.
As an example, suppose that a person requires urgent medical attention. He goes to a nursing student who, although with good intentions, decides that the situation is serious and the patient must be operated on immediately. As soon as the operation begins, the patient dies, without the nurse trainee knowing very well what went wrong.
The relatives of the deceased can take the apprentice nurse to court and claim that he acted incompetently, since he undertook a life-or-death operation for which not only is he not certified, but he has neither the knowledge nor the practice. Justice, then, would have to determine how the relatives of the deceased will be compensated and what punishment the nurse apprentice must face.
See also: Dexterity
Incompetence, imprudence and negligence
Incompetence is a legal concept that can be aggravated by two others, of a similar nature, which are imprudence and negligence.
- Inexperience is the lack of preparation and knowledgeskills or resources to undertake an action in the correct way or with the best chances of success. This concept applies even if you have good intentions. For example: a person who decides to drive a tractor without having any idea how it is done and ruins an important harvest.
- Imprudence is lack of caution when doing something. Therefore, even people prepared, trained and empowered to carry out an action can incur it, since it is the result of hasty actions, which take unnecessary risks or do not take due precautions into account. For example: someone who, knowing that he has had several drinks of alcohol, decides to drive his car and causes a fatal accident.
- The negligence consists of committing actions without taking into account due rigorthe necessary precautions or rigorous considerations, despite being informed of them and knowing what the consequences may be. For example: a doctor who prescribes a drug with a very allergic effect to a patient, without first asking him if he suffers from allergies or doing the proper tests, and the drug, instead of helping, kills the patient.
Examples of incompetence
Some examples of inexperienced behaviors may be the following:
- Dad, who knows nothing about electronics, decides disassemble the tv control that is failing; When you finish putting it back together, the control has stopped working completely and you have to buy a new one.
- A friend, an apprentice carpenter, assured me that plumbing was not very different from carpentry and tried to fix a drain. Instead, he ended up breaking it completely.
- Instead of going to the doctor to cure the flu, I was taking antibiotics on my ownwithout knowing that antibiotics do nothing to viruses.
Continue with: Professionalism
References
- “Impericia” in the Dictionary of the Language of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Impericia” in Legal Dictionary.
- “Radication of the word Impericia” in the Online Spanish Etymological Dictionary.
- “Imperice, imprudence and negligence” in the College of Physicians of the Province of Buenos Aires (Argentina).
