UNDERSTANDNG YOUR OWN EXPERTISE

Understanding Your Own Expertise

Understanding Your Own Expertise

I've been thinking lately, what makes someone an "expert" in his or her field? Apparently Lorelle VanFossen has been thinking the same thing, because she recently wrote a post called What Gives You the Right to Tell Me? at The Blog Herald that explores the issue of expertise in some depth.

For me, the question started to percolate through my mind when I was invited to speak at an academic conference on anthropology and counter-insurgency recently. Apparently, I have become an expert on the topic, someone people look to when they want more information.

Thinking about how I came to be a "go-to" person on this topic has gotten me thinking about how anyone becomes the person to call when you need help, about how people become experts in their field. It's not so simple, I think, as just learning everything there is to know and hanging out your shingle. In fact, anyone who thinks they have learned everything there is to know about a topic probably isn't an expert — I'd call them something closer to "rank amateur".Some­times it appears as though there are a lot of peo­ple who revel in boast­ing about their exper­tise in what­ever topic they claim to be an expert in. This seems to be the case whether it's cars, inter­re­la­tion­ship skills, clothes, arts and crafts, or a sport. You name it; there will be an “expert” who can be found for it. Experts who can help oth­ers become bet­ter at that par­tic­u­lar skill or hobby. In today's world of ultra-competition this can be a bless­ing for those of us who need to develop our­selves in one of those areas. But what does it really mean to be an expert? If a per­son chooses to become bet­ter at some­thing, and even­tu­ally be looked upon as an expert, hav­ing a basic under­stand­ing of what it means to be an expert will cer­tainly be help­ful in achiev­ing that goal.I have expertise in some fields, some of it rather dated. But am I an expert? I suppose I could consult a dictionary and see. In every field where I have some depth of understanding or which I enjoy exploring, I know people who are better at it than I am. So if "expert" is a comparative classification, I might chose to compare myself with them and say I would hardly qualify as a rank amateur. Technical expertise often becomes obsolete very quickly in some fields. That's why I finally gave up programming. Reinventing my skills - the same damned skills in principle - with a new tool set every 6 months to a year for decades got veeeeeery old after a while. "Expert" sounds very static to me, but I might be one today in some subject matter and hopelessly, uselessly out of date in the same subject months or years later.Adding to that I'm an expert translator. When asked my field of expertise on forms, I'm often tempted to write 'translation' ...