Are you an expert?

Wondering if you’re an expert in your field? According to Salas (2010), expertise encompasses one’s ability to perform repeatedly at high levels and describes the cognitive, behavioral, and attitudinal adaptations to the performance domain. Although, due to the lack of “gold standards” and methods, the identification of experts is a complex task, the following 6 characteristics provide a framework for expertise and may help identify areas of improvement (Salas, 2010).

1. Knowledge: experts’ vast collection of concepts is organized around greater abstract relationships with links between concepts so they can easily cross-reference. Ask yourself: Do you see the bigger picture? Can you make connections between the concepts and relate them in many ways?

2. Pattern Recognition: experts see the world in patterns. Storing complex patterns enables rapid perception and response selections due to their dynamic experience of situations. Ask yourself: Are you able to identify a recurring problem or a pattern? Do you make use of those patterns to identify and deal with new experiences?

3. Representations: with a profound understanding of the task domain, experts create functional and abstract representations while integrating environmental cues. They spend more time than novices creating representations so they can effectively rely on pattern recognition and mental simulations to evaluate situations. Ask yourself: How much time do you spend on patterns and representations of your world? Do you ponder and simulate situations in your mind?

4. Memory Skill: encode-retrieve-associate. Experts select pertinent information, translate it into episodic long-term memory, and recover it later by regenerating those cues. Ask yourself: Do you interpret and store new information? Are you able to easily retrieve it later by relying on environmental indications?

5. Automaticity: experts experience adaptive automation (changes in the level of automation) and are thus able to allocate cognitive resources to higher level processes. Ask yourself: How free is your mind to reflect on new problems? Are you able to automate parts of the process so you can spend more time and effort on new cues?

6. Metacognition and Self-Regulation: experts are aware of their knowledge and are constantly monitoring their own processes to detect errors, reasons for the errors, and generate solutions. Ask yourself: Do you regularly check yourself? Do reflect on your process and look for strengths and room for improvement?

Wondering what you need to work on to become an expert? Check out our Become an Expert in your Field article (coming out next week)!

References:
Salas, E., Rosen, M. A. (2010). Experts at work: Principles for developing expertise in organizations. In S. W. J. Kozlowski, & E. Salas (Eds.), Learning, training, and development in organizations. (pp. 99-134). New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

By: Teresa Aires