When Experience Pays Off: Professional Development, Work Scheduling, and Performance

Abstract Organizations routinely face scheduling decisions that affect worker performance, with rest and preparation being particularly crucial for high-intensity, performance-critical contexts. Yet little is known about how professional experience affects workers’ ability to adapt to variations in these preparation windows. We examine whether scheduling sensitivity varies with career experience, using variation in NBA game start times during the 2023–24 season to identify preparation constraints. Using fixed-effects models, we find that experienced players demonstrate superior performance when preparation windows are compressed, while younger players benefit more from extended preparation time. This suggests that accumulated professional experience enables better adaptation strategies through learning-by-doing. These findings highlight important considerations for competitive balance in sports leagues and suggest organizations may benefit from experience-differentiated scheduling policies that leverage experienced employees’ adaptation capabilities while providing structured preparation windows for newer workers.