Posted on Sep 1, 2023
What is the difference between experience vs expertise? Are you an Expert?
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Recently was I was able to talk about this. I am not a fan of the term "SME." Experts are credentialed. If you are an Expert Infantryman then you were tested and passed. Too often I hear find the SME being self-proclaimed. I think we have all seen that person that was been at a job for a long duration and feels they are an expert. They may be good at what they do but then what is an expert? Can they train another person in that role? Did they just build the habits required to be successful at a process?
I don't believe that experience equates to expertise at all. I feel this way with veterans. Just because you deployed and performed your duties doesn't make you better than someone that hasn't deployed. They just happened to be at the right place and time to deploy. They could gain experience and knowledge to become expert while deployed but you don't become an expert by accident.
How you do become an expert? Are you an expert?
I don't believe that experience equates to expertise at all. I feel this way with veterans. Just because you deployed and performed your duties doesn't make you better than someone that hasn't deployed. They just happened to be at the right place and time to deploy. They could gain experience and knowledge to become expert while deployed but you don't become an expert by accident.
How you do become an expert? Are you an expert?
Knowledge
Training
Job/Skill Training
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 11
CPT (Join to see) Anyone can have experience, but if you are content to do the same thing year after year, then all you have is experience. On the other hand, if you are constantly learning and expanding the boundaries of your job, you gain expertise. I had expertise in multiple fields during a 33 year Space Shuttle career due to dedication and commitment. During my career, I held brown bag lunch discussions where I taught co-workers about money management and investing. I was highly skilled but not in the expert category.
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Spending a month on a skill, that gives you experience. Spending a lifetime on a skill, perfecting that skill, that is what gives you the expertise. That's how I see it, at least.
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A1C Medrick "Rick" DeVaney
~~~~ EXACTLY ~~~~
That's How You SEE It,
Because That's How It IS.
Clear, Concise & Directly To The Point.
That's How You SEE It,
Because That's How It IS.
Clear, Concise & Directly To The Point.
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In a court room it works like this. The jury leaves. The Prosecutor, Defense and Judge ask you questions, if you know more about the question at hand, you are dubbed "An expert". The jury is called back in and the questioning of you begins. The questioning has to be very specific and pointed towards one question or point. You can give an "Opinion", normally not allowed. In another context, you may be the "go to" who understand a topic more or better than anyone else, or you can explain it better than anyone can, or you can write it in a policy that even attorneys can understand and not find a way around it. Maybe it's due to training, education, experience... or all three. One of my experiences with this was this question: Can a 9mm, fired from a handgun, hit a door and "blow" it open without any other factors involved? More context: His footprints (Boot prints) were also on the door. The round didn't hit anything but the core of the door, not a bolt, not a latch, or lock. He claimed the door just, "Opened", all on its own, when he fired a round at the door (A crime(s) unto itself that he just admitted to in open court). Your standard American home door? I was dubbed a "Ballistics" expert. An "Ex" is a has been and a "pert" is a drip under pressure. Signed: Use of Force, SME for many years. Advanced Firearms Instructor for many decades. Involved in 279 use's of force, never lost a case in court, including State Court of Appeals. I had been called in on many UOF incidents to give my "Opinion", reviews, court, investigations, videos, lawsuits, etc. I was NEVER considered a "Ballistics" SME kinda guy or "Ex-pert" on Ballistics,... before or since. So...... it is a very complex question and can mean very different things to different people, situations, or questions. I agree, just because you were in a "Combat" area of operation does not make one an "Expert" in any particular example... OR it could... Particulars are important to the question.
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I have a lot of Life experience and common sense I am 74 and the only thing I am an expert at now is thanking the Lord for each new day.
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"I don't believe that experience equates to expertise at all." I would disagree; to a point. I think that experience COULD produce an "expert", but simply having experience does not necessarily make someone an expert. If that makes sense...
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Looks Like Ya Got It Nailed...
And Here's One MOST People Get Screwed Up.
The Difference Between An Expert And A Professional;
And Those Whom Refer To Themselves As Professionals Are In For A Lesson.
An "Expert" Is Well Trained In Their Field, And Is Capable Of Preforming The Tasks...
Whereas Being A "Professional" ONLY Means "You've Been Paid To Preform A Service"
But Does NOT Mean You Have To KNOW Anything About It...
And That's Exactly WHY, Amateur's Have An Amateur Status.... As Olympians Do.
They've Never Made Money From The Activity.........
So When Someone Says "I'm A Professional In My Field;
It Really Isn't Saying Much...So Don't Be Impressed By Their Bull Sh*t;
They May Not Know Anything About It...
So, If You Want Proper Information, You're In Need Of An"Expert".
And Here's One MOST People Get Screwed Up.
The Difference Between An Expert And A Professional;
And Those Whom Refer To Themselves As Professionals Are In For A Lesson.
An "Expert" Is Well Trained In Their Field, And Is Capable Of Preforming The Tasks...
Whereas Being A "Professional" ONLY Means "You've Been Paid To Preform A Service"
But Does NOT Mean You Have To KNOW Anything About It...
And That's Exactly WHY, Amateur's Have An Amateur Status.... As Olympians Do.
They've Never Made Money From The Activity.........
So When Someone Says "I'm A Professional In My Field;
It Really Isn't Saying Much...So Don't Be Impressed By Their Bull Sh*t;
They May Not Know Anything About It...
So, If You Want Proper Information, You're In Need Of An"Expert".
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In my civilian fire service, we had a saying - “that guy there has 20 years of experience.” “That other guy over there has one year of experience, 20 years in a row.” Yes, it was easy after just a few shifts to tell who the expert was. Does he/she seek out training opportunities on their own time? Invest in education on their own dime? Earn certifications beyond what’s required? These things don’t make an expert by themselves, but they point to someone on their way to being an expert.
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An expert says " Ask me and I will tell you!" Experience will say, " I been here and this is what I did or how I resolved it."
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I absolutely agree that experience does not necessarily equate to expertise.
I would say that experience is an essential element of expertise. This makes experience a simple gate for initial evaluation of expertise: if the individual lacks experience, they are NOT an expert.
The military uses the term Subject Matter Expert primarily to refer to those positions qualified to either conduct or develop training on a specific topic. We have a long tradition of expecting all NCOs to be SMEs across the full spectrum of their MOS, including both MOS-specific and Common tasks. Everyone knows this isn't realistic, but we continue to maintain the pretense throughout most of our force structure.
It is very unfortunate that in the mid-1970s the US Army made a deliberate decision to avoid having real experts serving throughout the force.
Like most bad decisions in the military, this decision was made with the best of intentions and for good reasons. The concept that the Army chose to apply didn't absolutely need to be the disaster that it was and still continues to be, but like so many new programs in the military the change was very badly implemented.
What was this disastrous new program? Perhaps you've heard of it -- It was called Performance Oriented Training.
The concept was wonderful in its simplicity. Teach the soldiers what they need to know to perform their jobs. Who could argue against that? What could possibly go wrong with a program that called for teaching each soldier what he needed to know to do his job? To understand why this was a new program and to see how it went wrong, you have to understand what Army training looked like before Performance Oriented Training.
Let's talk about rifle training. The new soldier obviously needed to be trained on his rifle, and he certainly was trained. He learned all about his rifle: how long it was, how much it weighed (with and without ammunition), how to tell where it was manufactured, how to disassemble it, the correct name for each part, how each part worked, the complete cycle of functioning, how to properly inspect, clean, and lubricate each part, how to assemble the rifle, how to adjust the sights, how to load the rifle, how to aim the rifle, how to hold the rifle, how to properly assume each of the approved firing positions, etc., etc.
The idea behind Performance Oriented Training was that a lot of the items we were spending time training weren't essential to the soldier's job. Think how much time we could save if we got rid of all the useless "nice to know" material and just taught the soldier how to load, aim, and fire his rifle!
With visions of all those $AVING$ in mind, the Army jumped into Performance Oriented Training with both feet. We immediately eliminated all the unnecessary material from every lesson plan in every school in the Army. We also developed a whole new way of looking at training. Instead of teaching a soldier about a subject, we were now going to teach the soldier to perform a task. (This caused us to develop "Tasks" but that's a whole different rant.)
Like any new program, there were some people who resisted the change, but like any new program pushed from the top, anyone who objected was pushed aside and the way to be Up-And-Coming was by supporting the program avidly, literally, and yes excessively.
In less than a decade, Army "training" became a system of teaching monkeys to push buttons. It is very efficient to teach a monkey that when the red light comes on you push the blue button. You can train a lot of monkeys very efficiently and they all will be experts at pushing the blue button when the red light comes on. None of them will know what the red light means. None of them will know what the blue button does. But all of them will know to push the blue button when the red light comes on. 100% success in training!
But what happens when the next box comes with a yellow light and a green button? Start all over from scratch. Or worse yet, what if we issue that new box to a unit that has some of the old monkeys and one of them has initiative to decide that colors don't matter so when the yellow light came on he tried pushing the green button, but maybe that's NOT the right thing to do -- Ooops!
Even we never have to face the problem of a new box with different lights and buttons, what happens in combat when the red light fails to come on, or when pushing the blue button doesn't work? Sorry, Sir, they didn't cover that in the box training course.
Armor was the first branch to notice the problem. Their stopgap solution was to create the Master Gunner program that was supposed to keep the knowledge alive until ANCOC could be revised to ensure that all senior NCOs got the kind of training that included the how and the why rather than just Do This.
Of course the Army decided it would cost too much to revise ANCOC to train all the senior NCOs, so instead Armor was allowed to keep the Master Gunner program, creating a select group of NCOs who had that special knowledge. Other branches soon copied that concept and now we have many flavors of "Master Gunner" throughout the force. There is a reason that Master Gunners are often sarcastically referred to as "the Priesthood" for being the select group chosen as keepers of the arcane knowledge and able to perform strange rituals like boresighting.
I would say that experience is an essential element of expertise. This makes experience a simple gate for initial evaluation of expertise: if the individual lacks experience, they are NOT an expert.
The military uses the term Subject Matter Expert primarily to refer to those positions qualified to either conduct or develop training on a specific topic. We have a long tradition of expecting all NCOs to be SMEs across the full spectrum of their MOS, including both MOS-specific and Common tasks. Everyone knows this isn't realistic, but we continue to maintain the pretense throughout most of our force structure.
It is very unfortunate that in the mid-1970s the US Army made a deliberate decision to avoid having real experts serving throughout the force.
Like most bad decisions in the military, this decision was made with the best of intentions and for good reasons. The concept that the Army chose to apply didn't absolutely need to be the disaster that it was and still continues to be, but like so many new programs in the military the change was very badly implemented.
What was this disastrous new program? Perhaps you've heard of it -- It was called Performance Oriented Training.
The concept was wonderful in its simplicity. Teach the soldiers what they need to know to perform their jobs. Who could argue against that? What could possibly go wrong with a program that called for teaching each soldier what he needed to know to do his job? To understand why this was a new program and to see how it went wrong, you have to understand what Army training looked like before Performance Oriented Training.
Let's talk about rifle training. The new soldier obviously needed to be trained on his rifle, and he certainly was trained. He learned all about his rifle: how long it was, how much it weighed (with and without ammunition), how to tell where it was manufactured, how to disassemble it, the correct name for each part, how each part worked, the complete cycle of functioning, how to properly inspect, clean, and lubricate each part, how to assemble the rifle, how to adjust the sights, how to load the rifle, how to aim the rifle, how to hold the rifle, how to properly assume each of the approved firing positions, etc., etc.
The idea behind Performance Oriented Training was that a lot of the items we were spending time training weren't essential to the soldier's job. Think how much time we could save if we got rid of all the useless "nice to know" material and just taught the soldier how to load, aim, and fire his rifle!
With visions of all those $AVING$ in mind, the Army jumped into Performance Oriented Training with both feet. We immediately eliminated all the unnecessary material from every lesson plan in every school in the Army. We also developed a whole new way of looking at training. Instead of teaching a soldier about a subject, we were now going to teach the soldier to perform a task. (This caused us to develop "Tasks" but that's a whole different rant.)
Like any new program, there were some people who resisted the change, but like any new program pushed from the top, anyone who objected was pushed aside and the way to be Up-And-Coming was by supporting the program avidly, literally, and yes excessively.
In less than a decade, Army "training" became a system of teaching monkeys to push buttons. It is very efficient to teach a monkey that when the red light comes on you push the blue button. You can train a lot of monkeys very efficiently and they all will be experts at pushing the blue button when the red light comes on. None of them will know what the red light means. None of them will know what the blue button does. But all of them will know to push the blue button when the red light comes on. 100% success in training!
But what happens when the next box comes with a yellow light and a green button? Start all over from scratch. Or worse yet, what if we issue that new box to a unit that has some of the old monkeys and one of them has initiative to decide that colors don't matter so when the yellow light came on he tried pushing the green button, but maybe that's NOT the right thing to do -- Ooops!
Even we never have to face the problem of a new box with different lights and buttons, what happens in combat when the red light fails to come on, or when pushing the blue button doesn't work? Sorry, Sir, they didn't cover that in the box training course.
Armor was the first branch to notice the problem. Their stopgap solution was to create the Master Gunner program that was supposed to keep the knowledge alive until ANCOC could be revised to ensure that all senior NCOs got the kind of training that included the how and the why rather than just Do This.
Of course the Army decided it would cost too much to revise ANCOC to train all the senior NCOs, so instead Armor was allowed to keep the Master Gunner program, creating a select group of NCOs who had that special knowledge. Other branches soon copied that concept and now we have many flavors of "Master Gunner" throughout the force. There is a reason that Master Gunners are often sarcastically referred to as "the Priesthood" for being the select group chosen as keepers of the arcane knowledge and able to perform strange rituals like boresighting.
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A1C Medrick "Rick" DeVaney
CPT (Join to see) - ...
I Sure Hope Training In The Military Services Is Better Than In The Public Schools,
I'm Now Quite Well Educated, Due To My Military Service And The Abundance Of Business Programs We Had Available; However I DID Leave Public Schools Mid-9th Grade. .
BTW, I Also Worked In Our Schools, And None Have Advanced Anywhere Near The Rate At Which Our Technical Needs Have....And At The Rate We're Falling Behind, We'll Never Be Able To Catch Up. The Entire K-12 System Is In Need Of Revamping. Here's The Current Issues....About They've Been This Way For Decades... Chances Are Great, You'll Understand EXACTLY What I'm Referring To..... Our Student Spend A Total Of 13 Years In School,If All Goes Well; And Upon Graduation They Remain Uneducated.... Here's How To Clear Up What I've Said:.. Upon Graduation & Obtaining Their High School Diplomas, Can Anyone Name Just ONE Occupation, Which ANY Of Them Are Qualified To Preform?
YUP.. That's Truly How Much Trouble We're In.... Rather Frightening, Isn't It?
I Sure Hope Training In The Military Services Is Better Than In The Public Schools,
I'm Now Quite Well Educated, Due To My Military Service And The Abundance Of Business Programs We Had Available; However I DID Leave Public Schools Mid-9th Grade. .
BTW, I Also Worked In Our Schools, And None Have Advanced Anywhere Near The Rate At Which Our Technical Needs Have....And At The Rate We're Falling Behind, We'll Never Be Able To Catch Up. The Entire K-12 System Is In Need Of Revamping. Here's The Current Issues....About They've Been This Way For Decades... Chances Are Great, You'll Understand EXACTLY What I'm Referring To..... Our Student Spend A Total Of 13 Years In School,If All Goes Well; And Upon Graduation They Remain Uneducated.... Here's How To Clear Up What I've Said:.. Upon Graduation & Obtaining Their High School Diplomas, Can Anyone Name Just ONE Occupation, Which ANY Of Them Are Qualified To Preform?
YUP.. That's Truly How Much Trouble We're In.... Rather Frightening, Isn't It?
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MSG Thomas Currie
CPT (Join to see) - Thanks for your input. Yes, we change the name of the "system" or "model" every few years to whatever is currently the Next Big Thing In Training, but the problem remains the same, because the content doesn't change.
The problem is considerably less in the officer courses because most of the officer "tasks" don't really fit the definition of a task and the training has to include more decision making which forces that training to include more of the why and how rather than just the steps to do.
There is no doubt that "the process works" but in our enlisted training we are still almost entirely teaching monkeys to push buttons. The process works because all the monkeys learn to push the right button -- but in the vast majority of training they still don't know why they are pushing the button or what that button does.
The problem is considerably less in the officer courses because most of the officer "tasks" don't really fit the definition of a task and the training has to include more decision making which forces that training to include more of the why and how rather than just the steps to do.
There is no doubt that "the process works" but in our enlisted training we are still almost entirely teaching monkeys to push buttons. The process works because all the monkeys learn to push the right button -- but in the vast majority of training they still don't know why they are pushing the button or what that button does.
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CPT (Join to see)
MSG Thomas Currie - I totally get where you are coming from. We do teach the same tasks as enlisted. An ambush is an ambush. I was part of an professional development session where they called this spatial cognition. It really has to do with make the best decision with the best information based on the development of the situation. I do that that because of the officer education is smaller it makes it easier to manage. I recall the new CSA say that we need to modernize the NCO. I like that. What makes it hard is that it's such a large institution. It will take time to change.
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MSG Thomas Currie
CPT (Join to see) -
You mention your time as an instructor and course developer -- I had a bit over two decades at the Maneuver Center as one of the Training Specialists that developed entire POIs and wrote the lesson plans that instructors are supposed to help develop.
You said "We do teach the same tasks as enlisted" but then describe Skill Level 3 & 4 training where we do somewhat shift towards education rather than the style of training that we use at Skill Levels 1 & 2 where we deliberately exclude the why and anything beyond perform-these-steps-in-this-order.
As an infantry officer you have had training on a variety of small arms, from the pistol and rifle up through the M2 machine gun. That training was mostly "the same tasks as enlisted" with hopefully a little bit about employment added. Perhaps the employment part of the machine gun training might have even briefly mentioned something about trajectory and maybe one of the rifle classes mentioned something about the different point of impact at longer ranges, but no one outside the Master Gunner courses gets any serious training about trajectory for small arms. Concepts like grazing fire and plunging fire still appear in some of our manuals but don't fit nicely into our neat task structure so they aren't taught and are well on their way to being forgotten.
I'm confident you can unload, clear, disassemble, clean, inspect, lubricate, assemble, perform a function check, load, aim, and fire each of the weapons you were trained on. But how much do you understand about how those weapons function? You can perform Immediate Action if a weapon fails to fire, but if that doesn't resolve the problem, it's time to take the weapon to a small arms repairer and tell them "it won't fire" because soldiers aren't supposed to know anything beyond what fits neatly in each individual task.
I readily agree that we don't have time to teach every soldier every bit of "nice to know" information but in banning all that "nice to know" information from formal training we have gradually lost most of that knowledge because the knowledge is not viewed as valuable (and very often viewed as inappropriate).
You mention your time as an instructor and course developer -- I had a bit over two decades at the Maneuver Center as one of the Training Specialists that developed entire POIs and wrote the lesson plans that instructors are supposed to help develop.
You said "We do teach the same tasks as enlisted" but then describe Skill Level 3 & 4 training where we do somewhat shift towards education rather than the style of training that we use at Skill Levels 1 & 2 where we deliberately exclude the why and anything beyond perform-these-steps-in-this-order.
As an infantry officer you have had training on a variety of small arms, from the pistol and rifle up through the M2 machine gun. That training was mostly "the same tasks as enlisted" with hopefully a little bit about employment added. Perhaps the employment part of the machine gun training might have even briefly mentioned something about trajectory and maybe one of the rifle classes mentioned something about the different point of impact at longer ranges, but no one outside the Master Gunner courses gets any serious training about trajectory for small arms. Concepts like grazing fire and plunging fire still appear in some of our manuals but don't fit nicely into our neat task structure so they aren't taught and are well on their way to being forgotten.
I'm confident you can unload, clear, disassemble, clean, inspect, lubricate, assemble, perform a function check, load, aim, and fire each of the weapons you were trained on. But how much do you understand about how those weapons function? You can perform Immediate Action if a weapon fails to fire, but if that doesn't resolve the problem, it's time to take the weapon to a small arms repairer and tell them "it won't fire" because soldiers aren't supposed to know anything beyond what fits neatly in each individual task.
I readily agree that we don't have time to teach every soldier every bit of "nice to know" information but in banning all that "nice to know" information from formal training we have gradually lost most of that knowledge because the knowledge is not viewed as valuable (and very often viewed as inappropriate).
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