Practice Makes Perfect?

As a recruiter, I value experience as one of the key indicator of a great candidate. Candidate's expertise in their field usually shown in their experience. The longer the experience they have, it's more likely that they possess greater expertise in their field. It's simply because longer experience in their field, means longer time to master their expertise. Day to day task combined with incidental problems that emerge in their work setting is the main contributor of shaping their expertise. These expertise will be useful for the candidate when they're hired and adapting for their new role.

Even though I believe longer experience means more expertise in one's field, I often find this premise flawed. Sometimes I met candidates with a lot of work experience, but not showing much knowledge on their field when it comes to technical interview with user. Sometimes even candidate with less amount of experience show a greater knowledge on their field when facing user interview rather than the one with more experience. This phenomenon raised a question in my mind. Why these candidates with a lot more experience showing less knowledge than the candidates with less experience?

One of the main reason this phenomenon occur is the difference in how they do practice their expertise. Practice refers to the act of performing or exercising a skill repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one's proficiency. If you take a closer look on the definition, practice can be classified into two acts. One act refer to maintaining one's proficiency, the other refer to improving one's proficiency. I think this shows the difference, one candidate perform the act of practice to maintain their skill or expertise, the others aim to improve theirs.

In the professional field, you'll encounter this two choices choose when it comes to practice. You can choose whether you want to do practice just to maintain your skill or to improve your skill. If you aim to maintain your skill, you can simply do your work routine everyday, go to work, do your task, and so on. However, if you aim to improve your skill, you have to do your extra effort. This extra effort is not the most pleasent thing to do, but it is the one that contribute on your skill improvement.

One of the most effective way of practice is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice refers to a spesific kind of practice that require someone to have spesific goal to be improved, structured practice routine, and purposeful motivation. It is much different than ordinary practice. There is four main components when it comes to deliberate practice; spesific goal, focus, feedback, repetition. In order to do a deliberate practice, you must have a spesific goal that you want to achieve. The goal should be spesific, it's not just "I want to get better at my job" kind of goal, but a spesific part of your job such as "I want to get better at using the formula of Ms. Excel". Then, you have to have a full undivided attention on those matter. After you practice with a spesific type of goal with full attention, you must seek feedback from other people on how you're doing and what can you improve. The rest is repetition on those process, do it over and over again with occasional evaluation to ensure mastery in your expertise.

Lets take an example, lately I've been doing daily afternoon badminton games with my younger brother. It's a routine that we have to pass time in order to stay healthy. I have no spesific goal of improving my badminton skills. I just have one goal, to get better at the game so I can play properly. Before I do this game as a daily routine, I rarely hit the shuttlecock due lack of accuracy. After a few rounds of this game, I felt like I'm getting better at this game. I've improved my accuracy at hitting the shuttlecock. At the same time, I've improved my ability to control how hard I should hit the shuttlecock. However, at a certain point, I hit a plateu. I'm not getting better at the game, yet not getting worse neither.

Lets compare it with what athletes do when they practice. Athletes do a different kind of routine when it comes to playing these games. They have a spesific goal to be reached. The aim of their practice is not merely just getting healthy or passing time, they want to be the best at their field. Badminton athelete usually have a spesific stretch goal to reach in every training session. Stretch goal is that one spesific goal that you can't reach yet, but aim to reach by practicing. In their practice, they would have full focus on the game and isolated from any distraction. After the practice session, they would seek feedback from their coaches, and repeat the process in the next practice session.

Deliberate practice also applies to our work setting. We could start by setting a spesific goal to improve. The goal should be slightly out of our reach also. Let say you're not that proficient in Ms. Excel. You can start by setting a goal of memorizing the formulas dan getting familiar with them. When you start to memorize the formula, try to keep focused on your goal. It would be even better if you distance yourself from any distraction. Then, follow it up with seeking feedback from our superior or your colleague. Ask them on how far do you improve, which part you're doing wrong, and what to improve next. Finally, do it over and over again with occasional evaluation and reflection.

Sometimes we're just too comfortable on doing our job, we forgot to take our expertise to the next level. We often get to immersed in our routine, that we forgot to sharpen our expertise. It's not wrong to be doing just fine in your field, but wouldn't it be better if you can be an expert on your field?

Experience does not leads to excellence, perfect practice does.

Reference:

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-R?mer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.

Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Toronto, Ontario, Canada