What Bothers Me About "Expert"

What does it mean to be a professional, specialized, and expert?

There must be something before expert. 

In order to understand what makes up the workplace hierarchy, I thought it made sense to start with what I see as the most basic level: a professional. Being a professional is simply explained: you make enough money to live off of that thing. It is work for which the compensation can provide you with food and shelter. 

It made sense to me to start here. The second I begin a job, I am a professional at that thing.

Professional can include all levels of professionalism- it does not imply any level of competence or specialized knowledge. A street performer who makes enough in tips to eat, drink, and have a roof over their head would be a professional street performer. 

Sometimes, the term professional is associated with a high level of talent, like in the realm of professional sports. That largely comes from it taking such a great amount of skill to get to the level of being paid to play sports. Getting to any level of sports where you are paid to play necessarily requires highly specialized training and skill. 

Nonetheless, being a professional means you get paid. That is the easiest of the categories to define.

The next step in my theoretical workforce hierarchy is more messy in my head. With my whole career ahead of me, I do not want to strive to be a professional. A high school dropout lazily waiting out the minutes of their life at a bowling alley would be a professional. But I’m young. I want to have goals larger than that. I want to be an expert.

The natural level above professionals in my eyes is a “specialized” worker. I see that as the key distinction between a professional and someone who is closer to becoming an expert. 

As I see it, specialization includes both skill and knowledge and it exists across all fields. Specialized, in this sense, describes the worker not the work. There are specialized workers, in every field, not just in fields that are typically considered specialized by nature. 

In order to separate oneself in their work field, one must create a specialized set of abilities. Common jobs like bathroom attendant, bowling alley attendant, or busboy do not require any significant specialized skill that the average person does not possess in order to begin working. The barrier to them beginning the job, the training, would be relatively low with those jobs, even without any formal education. Within a few hours of training, nearly any person could learn to be successful at common, low paying, often less desirable jobs.

So then I thought I had my answer: I just need to be specialized. That seemed easy. I want to be a lawyer, and nearly every lawyer I know is specialized in some way. I know criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, real estate lawyers, and entertainment lawyers. But does specializing necessary make you an expert of that thing? Is every person who picks a subfield on their way to eventual expertise?

 What does an expert have that we do not?

Specialization and expertise are based on a few central components. In order to figure out how to become an expert, we must look at what separates us from experts.

Knowledge is a major contributor to the notion of expertise. At its core, knowledge is the central difference between experts and non-experts. We perceive experts to possess knowledge beyond the average person, or beyond our knowledge. An expert doctor possesses medical knowledge that someone who did not go to medical school does not.

Knowledge, as I see it, is essentially proof of formal education: masters degrees, PHD’s, and other academic distinctions in one's field. It seems fair to assume that someone who has spent years in school learning pharmaceutical studies from an accredited university possesses, at least some, specialized knowledge in that area- assuming that only a small percentage of the total population has obtained the knowledge from those courses. 

In my case, a JD would probably suffice to reach an expert in law. I do not know many lawyers who have university degrees beyond a JD. Perhaps some have an MBA, but that is a reflection of their business expertise less than their legal expertise. 

Skill is the second notion that I most closely associated with expertise- skill is the physical manifestation of knowledge. Skill, in this sense, is the ability to perform a physical action, as part of your profession. The less common the skill is, the more valuable it is in the workforce. In most cases, skill comes as the tangible product of knowledge. It is what we most commonly see with our eyes. 

A specialized carpenter has an incredible set of knowledge, but that knowledge is worthless until it is combined with skill. In the case of a carpenter, the knowledge would be the mathematics, the skill would be in actually cutting and placing the wood. Both are vital to being a specialized carpenter.

Skill is the basis for a lot of professions, especially those that are usually associated with a certain body type: a dancer, a professional basketball player, and a furniture mover, all require a certain body structure and coordination. All of these relate to skills. 

But it is still much deeper than that. Knowledge is nothing without the ability to harness it into talent. A judge who knows every law, but can’t control a courtroom. Or a physical trainer who can name every muscle, but has terrible weight lifting form. Or a teacher with endless knowledge on the Civil War, but a crippling fear of public speaking. 

As I go through interview after interview, I recognize more and more that job interviews are based almost entirely on skill, not knowledge. If my interviews were based on my knowledge, they would be asking me questions on the information I learned in my classes. But every Political Science student across the country takes wildly different courses. Interviewers ask very simple questions, but truly judge on your skill in delivering whatever your brain comes up with. 

I see the last notable component of specialized work being: experience. Experience is the product of time and reflection. The longer you do the same job, or interact with the same set of stimuli, the more experience you gain in that field, job, or activity. But I think that only holds true if while you work, you remain skeptical- you question how to expand your knowledge and ability to provide a service. 

A pizza shop worker on their very first day has to learn to juggle the phone, the pizza making, the oven, boxing it all up, and getting it to the customer. Balancing all of these is no easy task. But as the days go by, a specialized pizza worker will learn to use a Bluetooth headset to answer the phone from anywhere in the store, and they will have advanced their bread kneading and sauce spreading skills to allow them to make a pizza in half the time it once took them. A non-specialized pizza worker will continue working just as they did that very first day for the duration of their employment.

There are definitely levels within specialization. The more you combine those three- knowledge, skill, experience- the more you move in the realm of specialized, towards expertise. I think. 

 Can experience alone be sufficient to achieve expertise? 

Experience is probably the one that interests me the most. 

In many jobs, where formal knowledge isn’t important, experience alone can lead to sufficient skill, and therefore, potentially to expertise. A great truck driver might lack a high school diploma, but they are surely a lot more capable 15 years into the job than they were on the first day, that is all experience.

But experience itself is not necessarily better the more there is. 

Experience can lead to repetition, and a blockage of creativity. Experience is more valuable at the beginning of one’s career than at the end. You hold more value to a company when you’re 35 than when you’re 25, but you hold more value at 65 than you do at 75, usually. Sometimes individuals have too much experience, and they are seen as less valuable than someone with fresh passion and ideas. I would argue that experience alone is not sufficient to expertise.

Importantly, all three components- knowledge, skill, and experience- are not actually measured by the amount any one person has, but instead by the amount someone is perceived to have. In reality, an academic degree is a perception of knowledge, very minimally does it display actual knowledge. The workforce has come to accept a degree as a sufficient document to prove breadth of knowledge- but there are many circumstances where someone without a degree has more tangible knowledge than someone with a degree. 

A roommate of mine is graduating with a Political Science major, just like me, from the same university, and we never overlapped a single class- just simply based on the breadth of classes offered in the major. Every class I took, he had never taken, and vice versa. I had the same number of common syllabi in my major with my Political Science roommate as I did with my engineering roommate. Yet, me and my Political Science friend’s degrees will reflect that we have the same set of knowledge. 

A degree is just the knowledge that others perceive you to have. Except in some computer science and math majors- then they expect basic understanding of certain concepts.

When applying that to our notion of expertise, it is important to remember that those with higher, or more degrees than us are simply perceived to know more. It is incredibly hard to measure any true set of knowledge because every course at every university is incredibly different. 

And actual school knowledge only matters so much in any job. Most jobs invest heavily in training you to do your job. 

Skill, I will admit, is less based in perception rather than knowledge often is- but it still is a little.

It is harder to fake a physical skill. You can either perform brain surgery or not. You can either juggle fire or not. I think we would be able to tell pretty quickly if someone who did not have skill at fire juggling was posing as someone who is an expert fire juggler- they would probably light themselves or everyone around them on fire. It is usually easy to tell who possesses a physical skill.

I love Gordon Ramsay’s show Kitchen Nightmares, but it also terrifies me. Before watching it, I was blissfully ignorant of how unhygienic some chefs and restaurant owners are. Many of those chefs possess no formal training, simply inspired by their parents cooking, and attempt to pose as highly skilled chefs. And every episode begins with the owners saying that business used to be booming. 

It can be easy to pose that you have skill- to make others perceive you to have highly specialized skill- in some instances.

So I have established that a specialized worker eventually becomes an expert at some combination of knowledge, skill, and experience. But what combination?

 When do you become an expert?

This is among the most difficult questions I encountered thinking. I keep coming back to it. At what point precisely does one cross the threshold of expertise? There are some answers I like, and some that I really do not but that are still worth mentioning.

The 10,000 hour rule- I’m only mentioning this because I feel like I have to. Every single person I talked to while brainstorming saif to me, “what about the 10,000 hour rule.” It’s the notion that if you spend 10,000 doing something- you are an expert. I have a very hard time believing that at the 9,999 hour you are not an expert and minutes later you are because a rule says you are. It’s a nice idea but too vague for me. 

Earning an academic degree is another often thought of as a threshold of expertise. I guess in this circumstance, the exact moment of finishing the degree requirements would be the threshold of expertise. That is the conclusion of the education for that degree. 

I would think this logic applies to slightly graduate and higher level degrees, like PhD, JD, or MD; I would not consider a 2-year or 4-year degree nearly adequate for achieving expertise.  

Still, I think merely finishing a set of classes is a bad indication of the threshold of being an expert. Probably because degrees are so widely available and reflect a very small amount of true skill. Almost everyone I know has an undergraduate degree, and a lot have masters- they can’t all be experts.

Someone who just graduated from medical school might be an expert compared to someone who didn't go to medical school, but relative to any doctor, especially one who has been in the field for a long time, that freshly graduated doctor is by no means an expert. My perception of schooling expertise is largely based on my own level of schooling at the moment. 

Promotion is more interesting.

Promotion is a moment that I can see being a potentially more valid threshold of expertise. In most cases, a promotion represents additional responsibilities, higher risk, and managing more people or equipment- not necessarily more ability to do that job. I’m skeptical of a promotion being an objective threshold for expertise because at the moment of a promotion you possess no knowledge or skill based distinction that you did not hold minutes before your receiving the promotion.

For the sake of this piece, promotion is not necessarily internal. Taking a job at another business in a role that requires more responsibility, would too be a promotion. 

There are, however, some instances that I see a promotion being a major difference in your role in the field. I see being “promoted” to a judge from a lawyer would be perceived as a potentially valid additional level of expertise. A judge exerts judgment over lawyers in a way that a lawyer does not with their colleagues. That is a fundamental shift in your effect on the process of law and your relationship to other lawyers. In some ways, that might be a legitimate threshold for expertise. Yet, a judge on their first day is no expert relative to their new judge colleagues.

Even in the notion of a promotion, it seems silly to assume that your combination of skill and knowledge just before you step in your bosses office are any different than right after you shake his hand accepting your new position. In reality, the exact moment of being offered a promotion is a symbol of you being an expert of the job you had, not one you are just beginning. The first day of a new promotion, you surely do not feel like an expert.

A promotion is simply validation from bosses, and others, of your success. It is the recognition that your ability to do your job is better than those who did not get promoted. 

But truly, that is precisely the core of what being an expert is. Expertise is based in the perception of others. And by virtue of your bosses perceiving your skills deserving of promotion, then those around you not in your field should surely see you as an expert. 

If I’m calling a new money managing firm, and they ask if there is any agent in specific I want to work with, I’d probably say: “whoever just got promoted.” Being promoted means others see you to be doing something right. 

A title change definitely causes a shift in how people perceive your workplace abilities. We perceive the Chief Administration Officer (CAO) lower than a Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Even though jobs are just a reflection of responsibilities, we perceive them to correlate to capability. 

I see expertise as most recognizable when you are able to adequately perform a service, or provide a form of aid to someone who you perceive to be at your level or above you in that ability. 

Expertise is achieved every time you are sought out to help solve a problem by someone who previously would not have asked you to, at a time before.

Expertise occurs at the moment that you provide that service. Right now, no one on Earth would call me to ask for my legal advice. I lack substantial and formal knowledge, skill, or experience. But in 5-7 years, friends and family will call me for my legal advice.

In 5-7 years, when I graduate law school and begin working as a lawyer, my bosses will not be calling me for help. They will be calling me to do other things- coffee, spellcheck, return phone calls- but not for advice. In 5-7, I will still look to my bosses for their legal advice. 

That will not be true once I progress into my career and begin having clients. Having clients is an interesting dynamic of expertise. They are asking for advice. But they often compare your advice against that of another lawyer, your competitor for expertise. 

Even still, being asked for your guidance is a clear indication of expertise. I’m not sure how to recognize it broadly, but you become an expert relative to someone else when you cross the threshold from them having at one point not valued your opinion on a given topic, and for whatever reason now they do value your opinion on that very same topic.