From Novice to Expert, Part 1

I was exposed to one of the most important concepts of my career at a young age.

Growing up, both of my parents were nurses. This had the consequence of many squeamish meals listening to them talk shop about the latest icky hospital encounter at the dinner table. But I also heard about various leadership and management topics over the years as my mom moved up in her career.

One such topic was the stages of competence covered in Benner’s From Novice to Expert. When learning, everyone moves through five stages of increasing skill (known as the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition) as follows:

Novice
Advanced Beginner
Competent
Proficient
Expert

Benner applied this to the nursing domain and clinical competencies. Showing nurses’ needs at different stages of professional growth. I encountered the Dreyfus Model again years later in Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, but this time the domain was software developers instead of nurses. As it turns out, the principles work for any domain with knowledge workers.

I have found that the model works both to help identify where a given resource falls on the scale and how to make that resource most effective in their day-to-day work. Each level has telltale signs. Look for those signs, give the resource what they need, and then work towards progressing them to the next level.

Novice level resources like to have recipes. They want to have their work broken down into a series of steps. Give them that list of steps, and they will happily work through it from top to bottom. Avoid variation. When a recipe has been mastered, give them another one.

Advanced Beginners have knowledge of several recipes, and they know when to switch from one recipe to another. If they encounter an issue in their recipe, they can switch to the “issue” recipe and follow those error handling instructions.

Competent resources have mastered many recipes, so many that they have started to develop rules to follow. When to do certain things. The best recipes for certain tasks. Competent resources also make for great trainers for more junior staff, teaching recipes.

Proficient resources have seen enough examples and scenarios that they have developed intuition about what is happening in any given situation, but they don’t necessarily know how to automatically solve or proceed forward.

Experts have developed full intuition—they know what is happening and exactly how to respond. Experts make tasks look simple and easy, almost magical. Given that what they do is intuition-based, they may not remember the reasons for what they do. So some experts may struggle to teach those who are novices and advanced beginners who need concrete information.