Are you Accelerating Expertise?

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Introduction

It's a New Year. Bring on the new year articles both retrospective and prospective. Here's some of my thinking at the end of the old year into the new one.

I've been thinking a great deal about what it means to be a learning and development professional in 2024 and beyond.

With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), we face both the opportunity to greatly accelerate our processes and the harsh reality of having our current way of working in the field of instructional design blow up. In the not-to-distant future, entire courses will be created with videos, images, and text purely from a URL and the click of the button.

Those won't be courses with proprietary or strategic advantages in terms of content, but rather generic type courses like: safety courses, compliance training, basic managerial instruction, generic sales tips, and customer service training. Generic content that can be quickly and easily assembled and converted into an online module or a microlearning course. I say "if the design, nuance, and impact of your course can be replicated by AI, it probably should be."

If the design, nuance, and impact of your course can be replicated by AI, it probably should be.

So where does that leave professionals in our field?

Purpose of the Field in Age of AI?

Our purpose (L&D and ID and LxDs) is to accelerate the expertise of our co-workers. To borrow from the Six-Million Dollar Man--to make them better, stronger, faster.

Many of our co-workers in our organizations are smart, intelligent, and independent learners. This is especially true of many in leadership positions (but not always). Most of leaders wouldn't be there if they weren't.

They can all become experts in various areas given enough time but, they don't have the time. They have limited resources to focus on becoming expert in something tangential but still important to their job. This is where we come in, we help accelerate that expertise for both the individual and the organization.

Few people care if the sales person knows about sales, they actually want them to make sales. A manager doesn't care if the field technician can recite the parts of the router, can they repair it? No one cares if you know the leadership model, can you adapt and apply it at the right time?

We need to leverage methods to be a catalyst to better performance.

How?

First, to view ourselves in the role of accelerating expertise. we need to abandon thinking of designing and delivering training. Instead, we need to think of ourselves as facilitating the acquisition of expert thinking and actions, it's a partnership, not a one-way street.

Next, we need to identify and replicate expertise. How do experts think? What is the difference between an expert performer and a novice performer? What do they think of or consider that others do not? We need to think about how we are replicating and accelerating expertise.

One way we can do this is by conducting a cognitive task analysis of people the organization has identified as experts. I read all this information on skills (which reminds me of the competency push years ago) and what I see missing is the hard work involved in figuring out how star performers apply the skills. It's not simply a matter of having a skill, it's how it's leveraged.

When I first got into the field, one of the most critical and important skills we practiced was conducting a task analysis. Now, I see workshops, boot camps, and other programs teaching ID without a single mention of the term "task analysis" let alone "cognitive task analysis". How can we accelerate expertise if we don't know what experts do differently? If we can't parse their expertise into observable elements.

Here is where we need to embrace AI and get out of training and begin to more deeply understand technology, how it works, how it's developed and how to integrated it into the tools we offer (we will be creating lots of tools/apps in the future).

We should use AI to help others act like an expert without the years and years of experience, trial and error, and training. If we understand how AI works and how people who are experts behave and think. We will be in a unique position to combine the two.

We need to start capturing and incorporating expertise into automated tools that we co-create with business partners based on what they need to convert their average performers to experts. We need to think about how the experts organize questions, make seemingly random connections, and develop insights. We want to move those processes and insights from the most expert person in the room to everyone else.

Growing Body of Knowledge

There are a number of resources we can read to get started.

In 2013 a team of folks consisting of Robert R. Hoffman, Paul Ward, Paul J. Feltovich, Lia DiBello, Stephen M. Fiore, and Dee H. Andrews wrote a book titled Accelerated Expertise (Expertise: Research and Applications Series) exploring this very concept. Others have looked at the concept of Deliberate Practice which is when a person (typically in music or sports) practices under the direct guidance and feedback of a coach or expert. Still others have looked at perceptual learning as a means of creating experts. There is not a lack of resources concerning accelerating expertise.

Back to Analysis

These resources are stepping stones upon which we can start to accelerate expertise in our companies, to add value. We need to become experts at analyzing experts and at observing their behaviors and de-constructing and sharing their thinking with others. In 1974 bionics was science fiction, in 2024 AI is NOT science fiction, it's a tool our field will use to accelerate the expertise of our co-workers and organizations and we are in an excellent position to make it happen.

Conclusion

Going back to the Six-Million Dollar man reference, we now have the technology to rebuild our field, we have the capability to make our co-workers AI assisted with apps, tools, and carefully conducted cognitive task analysis. We need to seize the moment.

Bio

Karl Kapp is a professor at Commonwealth?University (formerly Bloomsburg University). He works globally helping organizations accelerate expertise using an evidence-based approach. He is founder of the L&D Mentor Academy , a members only group that explores the technology, business acumen and concepts required to take L&D professional's careers to the next level. Apply to Join today.

Additionally, Karl is co-founder of?Enterprise Game Stack, a serious games company that creates digitized card games for learning ranging from interactive role-play games to sorting activities and everything in-between. Find out more at Enterprise Game Stack .

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