Mastering the art of becoming an expert

 Here's my question to you all !

Ever wondered why sometimes you attend a lecture at university / seminar / classroom and the instructor seems brilliant but you walk away not learning a thing? 

Often times Instructors have lost conscious awareness of 3 elements to becoming an expert and may neglect them from practice.

We all are working towards becoming a master or an expert in a field. So what steps does it take to become an expert?

Probably these three elements are required to developing mastery. 

We must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what we have learned. 

Let me break these down one by one and also provide you with some tips on how you can practice these for your own learning.

Acquiring Component Skills

Acquiring component skills include the basic learning of skills such as reading writing, analyzing, critical thinking. For example: when you are reading something, be it a novel or a book chapter or while analyzing a case study, component skills would include identifying the question, articulating perspectives, recommending solutions.

Tips for practice:

• Identify your blind spots
• Seek support from your mates, guides or supervisors with task decomposition
• Discuss with colleagues
• Explore more materials 

Integration

Practicing these component skills is needed to integrate them into your work, both separately and in combination with different skills. This element is often more difficult and demanding than the first.

Tips for practice:

• Give yourself time to practice and increase fluency
• Temporarily constrain the scope of the task by breaking a large task or skill down and focus on one aspect at a time
• Explicitly include integration in work activities by being intentional with practicing these skills into your day to day

Application

Obtaining the ability to integrate component skills successfully, knowing when and where to use what you have learned is as important as learning it. 

Tips for practice:

• Identify conditions of applicability i.e. identify contexts of where and when you can apply certain skills
• Apply skills and knowledge in diverse contexts meaning application of these skills in multiple situations
• Use comparisons to help identification. This requires identification of other problems, scenarios or tasks to differentiate characteristics and hence the application of the learnt thing in the most suitable situation / task

In order to become a master in your field, acquire the needed component skills, practice and integrate these components for grater automaticity and then understand the conditions and contexts on when and where to apply.

I found this helpful for my learning, I hope you do too.