Meringue looks fluffy, beautiful and solid, but it is actually very delicate. It crumbles easily. The Meringue Test is the degree to whether something that looks solid and stable is actually fragile and delicate.

As professionals, our ‘years of experience’ can cause us to fail the Meringue Test….meaning that we have years of experience doing something, but do not necessarily have experience doing it well, or doing it in ways that keep up with the evolution of our profession. Examples of professionals failing the Meringue Test would be a mechanic not knowing how to service a fuel-injected engine, or a roofer not knowing the latest hurricane roofing code, or an accountant not being proficient in QuickBooks Online.

Here’s the sucky part.

We don’t fail the Meringue Test all at once. Instead, we have success, or we get comfortable, or we get lazy, or, what seems most likely, we get too busy to keep up. As a result, our capabilities slowly atrophy until our “experience” masks our lack of real, contextual capability. And seemingly, all of a sudden, we are meringue…we look solid and capable, but when tested by the complexities and pressures of GovCon, our skills don’t hold up.

If we don’t maintain our skills through consistent, experience-based training, then our GovCon capabilities can become a meringue, appearing strong, but are actually quite fragile when exposed to the complexities of GovCon.

At Skyway, one of the key values we provide our clients is that we have been Contracting Officers. That contracting officer experience makes us unique, which allows us to bring our clients a unique perspective on any GovCon situation. However, we are former Contracting Officers. So, (are you ahead of me?), how do we keep from failing the Meringue Test? One could argue that our experience becomes more and more removed as the calendar dates slip by?

While the calendar dates do continue to roll by, we pass the Meringue Test by continuing to do the work of GovCon. We stay in the regs, we work in the contracts, we stay engaged with our clients, we stay engaged with the FAR, and involved in the pursuit and delivery of our contracts. We stay in the work. We are professionals working with professionals.

And most of all, we embrace the challenging reality that we will never know it all. One of Skyway’s Non-Negotiables (Be a Learner, not a Knower) highlights this point.

For example, one of the reasons that every episode of the Contracting Officer Podcast includes “FAR Time” is because we apply what’s in the FAR now, not when we were contracting officers. We research and apply what’s in the current regulation vs going off memory or experience alone. In fact, many of the concepts that we cover in our Contracting Officer Podcast episodes (OTA, Fixed Price T&M, protest of certain IDIQ orders, and more) have evolved, or even came about, since I was a Contracting Officer.

Ironically, I research the FAR now more than I did when I was a Contracting Officer.

Why?

Because 1) I have much more time to read and research the regs now than I did when I was a contracting officer and 2) staying neck deep in the FAR is the best way to thrive in GovCon. We stay ahead of the Meringue test by combining both the deep engagement with regs AND the unique perspective that comes from having been an actual contracting officer.

The bad news is that we can fail the Meringue Test by thinking our experience alone will keep us sharp. The good news is that we can pass the Meringue Test by focusing on the doing the work. It also helps if we like what we do…which we do. We don’t take our experience for granted. We add to it. Every. Single. Day.