40 Times People Witnessed Their Incompetent Coworkers Make Such Dumb Mistakes, They Could Never Forget Them

Bored Panda managed to get in touch with xk543x and they agreed to tell us about the origins of the post. "I was just chilling and drawing in my sketch pad when I came up with the idea to ask Redditors this question," they explained.

xk543x thinks hiccups at work are unavoidable and most are not a big deal but if you manage to make others doubt your competence, then it's a problem.

At the end of the day, they believe everything depends on what the employer is paying their employee. "Don't expect someone to dedicate their life to a job who would be reviewing applications tomorrow if you died today."

However, incompetence might not be entirely the workers' fault. Many of them want to be good at what they do but often do not get the opportunity to improve. 2018 research from Totaljobs has revealed that 2 in 3 UK workers have changed jobs due to a lack of learning and development opportunities.

"Importantly, four in five (81%) employers agree that their staff perform better after training, highlighting the positive impact training has on both businesses and employees, who benefit from refreshing existing skills and learning new ones," the researchers wrote. "Besides the positive impact on an individual’s career, businesses as a whole are reaping the rewards, with nearly 90% of employers stating that upskilling an individual team member also improves their wider team’s output."

"In fact, training is so important to the workforce that 41% of people say they have secured a new job as a direct result of training, which explains why almost half of the workers are paying for their own professional training," the researchers continued.

Highlighting this trend, over two-thirds (67%) of employees at the time believed training to be more important than a few years before the survey.

However, if you want to merely appear as if you're knowledgeable and capable, there are tricks to form such an impression.

For example, speak quickly. In one study, Brigham Young University researchers had 28 university students listen to recordings of six people whose voices had been manipulated to sound slower or faster than normal.

The student volunteers rated the speakers most competent when their voices had been sped up and least competent when their voices had been slowed down.

Also, if you're a woman, consider wearing makeup. Research suggests that wearing makeup can make women seem more competent.

In 2011, Nancy Etcoff at Harvard University led a study in which more than 250 adults looked at photographs of 25 women with different types of makeup. One-quarter of them wore no makeup, one quarter was made to look "natural" (some makeup), one quarter was made to look "professional" (a bit more makeup than the "natural" group), and one quarter was made to look "glamorous" (the most makeup).

Interestingly, the respondents rated the "glamorous" women the most competent and the barefaced women the least competent.

Research from Harvard Business School suggests that asking for advice can also make you seem more competent.

In one experiment, 170 university students worked on a series of computer tasks and were told they'd be matched with a partner who would complete the same tasks. (The partner was actually a computer simulation.) When they'd finished the tasks, the "partner" either said, "I hope it went well" or "I hope it went well. Do you have any advice?"

Students who'd been asked for advice found their "partner" more competent than those who hadn't.

(The researchers thought that when you ask for advice, you're validating the person's intelligence and experience, so they feel good about you in turn.)

Of course, you could just work on your skills. But who has time for that, right???