An empirical study of professionals’ experiential learning in Japan

This study examined the experiential learning of professionals and empirically analyzed the learning effect. As many professional studies have pointed out, professionals must continue to learn and improve their expertise throughout their careers to deliver higher-quality services. Experiential learning is a crucial subject for understanding the construction of professional knowledge. However, not much research has been accumulated. This study categorized professionals’ experience into four subcategories, each exploring the specific effects, distinguishing from previous research conceptualizing experience as a bundle. These four categories are broad experience, task-specific experience, breadth of experience, and depth of experience. Utilizing a dataset of 722 Japanese patent attorneys who owned individual firms, we analyzed panel data from 2002 to 2010. Regression analysis was employed to investigate the effect of patent attorney experience on two performance measures: patent grant rate and grant lag (i.e., time to patent registration). The results show that broad experience and breadth of experience positively impact the rate of patent grants. Additionally, broad experience and depth of experience help reduce the time taken for patent registration. The results are generally consistent with existing studies. However, task-specific experience has a negative effect on patent grant rate, contrary to previous research. This study provided insight into a deeper understanding of the learning curve and the underlying mechanism of professionals’ individual experiential learning. Also, this study added new insights by conducting empirical research in the Asian context since most previous studies have focused on Western professionals.