In a company, a skill is rarely absolute; it’s often evaluated based on know-how, soft skills, or communication skills that can only be measured in relation to others. From novice to expert, you have to manage different levels of intuition to build the best teams—those that allow everyone to thrive at their targeted skill level (which isn’t necessarily the highest in terms of expertise).
Several classifications exist to define skills. Today, I’m going to talk about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.
The Profiles
The Novice
They have little or no experience and their primary goal is to get results quickly. To do this, they expect clear explanations of constraints and absolute rules to overcome them and perform simple tasks. Successes quickly build their confidence, but they are easily disturbed by anything outside the nominal case.
The Advanced Beginner
They continue to focus on tasks but begin to gain perspective on the context, extrapolating from examples. This also allows them to gain perspective on their own skills and start to assert what they know how to do, and to consider what they still need to learn. Their execution still relies heavily on rules and instructions. In case of failure, they will easily blame their errors on these rules.
The Competent
By classifying and sorting their experiences, the beginner creates perspectives. When they start to choose the right perspective themselves, they become competent, take control of the situation, and take initiatives (emancipation through an instinctive vision of the solution). This phase requires overcoming their fears, which also brings the management of their emotions into the decision-making process.
The Proficient
They rely increasingly on intuition to recognize situations, trusting little or not at all in the sets of rules and maxims they know. They take an extra step back and begin to understand where the rules come from. Finally, they are able to enrich their knowledge through the feedback of others: they effortlessly transform information about acquiring know-how into information about soft skills and find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two.
The Expert
The expert reacts entirely intuitively, making the right decision directly. They are no longer conscious of the mechanisms that lead to their decision; they act by reflex. They are capable of analyzing their actions, but it requires effort: it is more natural for them to act than to explain or pay attention to how they behave.
Balancing a Team
In the Dreyfus model, there is no good or bad position, but rather an uneven distribution with a few novices, many advanced beginners, few proficient individuals, and very few experts. Expertise is almost entirely evaluated based on a person’s intuition, with beginners preferring the execution of rules. But this intuition comes at a cost: communication. Therefore, it is not advisable to directly group profiles with more than one level of difference. For example, there’s no point in putting together people who need many answers (novices) and people who are unable to provide them (experts).
Other Models?
Many other models exist, but I like this one because it easily debunks what we call an “expert” in the digital world. Very often, this is someone who knows their subject very well but is still capable of explaining things, or even enjoys doing so. In the Dreyfus matrix, this would therefore be more akin to a competent person.
I’ve met few true experts in my professional life, and I’m far from considering myself one of them on any subject, but since everything is relative, I’m surely someone’s expert (and someone else’s novice).
I try to always keep in mind that each skill must be evaluated individually and that one can be competent in one area and a novice in another. For my part, the highest degree doesn’t excite me: I love explaining what I do too much!