Expertise

Over the last 25 years, there has been a lot of research on how people develop expertise.  Our understanding of what expertise is, and how people develop it, has increased greatly.  One of the leading thinkers on expertise has been K. Anders Ericsson.  This literature is important because it can help us understand how to set up the conditions that can support expert performance within an organization, as well as helping us figure out ways to develop our own expertise. 

Ericsson and colleagues wrote a paper for the Harvard Business Review that is a very good introduction to expertise: The Making of an Expert. 

Among the highlights:

Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence shoes that experts are always made and not born.  We often think that people have inherent skills and abilities but this just doesn't turn out to be true.  Expertise is developed.  Developing expertise in a subject takes hard work.  In fact, the most important factor in studies of expertise are quality practice time – not inherent factors like IQ, learning styles, or anything else.  This has been shown to be true for every field that’s been studied.  The only exception is in sports where body size and height are important.

It takes time to become an expert – most people need a minimum of ten years of intense training.  Ten years of simply repeating the same things over and over again will give you experience, but it won’t make you and expert.  Expertise takes a constant drive to improve your own performance.  This means focusing on the things that you things you need to improve on, not on the things you can already do well. 

Practice must be deliberate.  Real experts seek out constructive (and sometime even painful) feedback.  The best way to improve is to constantly get, and act on, feedback about your performance.

Understanding expertise is important for anyone designing professional education experiences because we want to make sure that we're supporting the development of expertise.

For a more in-depth look at expertise (including a chapter on expertise in medicine), check out the The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.