Picking up from my previous post on the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, there are several takeaways I’d like to call out:

  • The majority of resources in your organization are Novices + Advanced Beginners. There are very few true Proficient and Expert level resources in any organization. According to Hunt in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, the distribution roughly follows this chart:

Chart: Distribution of Dreyfus Skill Levels (Image by Nat Eliason on nateliason.com)

  • You can be at different skill levels across different areas. Expert on one thing and Novice on others. I may have mastered all of the engineering areas needed to bring a large application to market, but that doesn’t mean I can back up a semi-truck. Being an expert in one thing doesn’t make you an expert in everything. But becoming an expert does help to unlock the metacognition necessary to become an expert in other areas more easily. You are more likely to develop expertise in other skills, especially in areas adjacent to your expertise.

  • Most of your self-proclaimed “experts” are actually Advanced Beginners. Advanced Beginners don’t know what they don’t know. They are unable to see the big picture. Their lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area will cause them to overestimate their competence. (See the Dunning-Kruger Effect) I can’t tell you how many resumes I’ve seen for developers that are fresh out of college or with a couple years of experience under their belts that claim the highest levels of expertise in many different programming languages. This is extremely unlikely.

  • When assessing competency, it’s less important whether a resource is located onshore or offshore than where they are in terms of skill acquisition. A Novice or Advanced Beginner in one country is going to be similar to a Novice or Advanced Beginner in another country. Novices and Advanced Beginners like to have recipes to work from. If the resources are denied this, they will struggle. If there isn’t investment to progressively develop skill levels, the resources likely won’t spontaneously get there on their own.

  • Incorporate Novice’s and Advanced Beginner’s need for recipes into your onboarding plans. Look at your onboarding plans. Do you throw everything at your resources in their first days or weeks at your company and expect this to lead to mastery? Resources need to receive training in chunks to avoid information overload and then have a chance to apply and master these areas before moving on to the next. Focus on items that will have a chance for frequent use. Train on tasks that will be performed now, not months from now. Training on rarely occurring items will have little chance for reinforcement and is likely a waste of time.

  • Also include recipes in the task planning for Novices and Advanced Beginners. Your more senior resources can become frustrated with junior resources. They might say, “The junior resources don’t know how to do anything. All I do is clean up their messes. It would be faster if I just did it myself.” Junior resources will be idling while senior resources are burning red-hot. Have a plan for how to use junior resources, focusing on their strengths—that they like lists and can work from them with a good success rate. Don’t give assignments that can’t be performed using a recipe. Don’t expect intuition and successful improvisation from resources that can’t see the whole picture.

  • Supervisors and project managers will have an overreliance on senior resources if you allow it. It’s easy to assign a resource with many skills and high expertise to any project or task. They know how to do anything or can figure it out easily. This makes a supervisor’s or project manager’s job easy—less work is needed from their standpoint to accomplish the goal. However, true expert resources are rare. You cannot sufficiently and effectively staff a project by using all Experts. And even if you could, it would likely not be affordable. Supervisors and project managers need strategies for making use of the large resource pool that they have access to, which includes Novices and Advanced Beginners.

  • Making sure junior resources are busy and fully utilized will not ensure success for your company. Identify what success for your company looks like, have a clear vision of goals for the company, and then align resources to these goals. Your Expert and Proficient resources are your leaders who can see the big picture. Have them focus on rare tasks and setting vision—identifying what should happen. Leverage Competent resources for developing recipes, training, and running your junior resources. Use Novices and Advanced Beginners for scale by augmenting your senior resources—taking repetitive tasks.

There are many more insights related to the Dreyfus Model and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I recommend reviewing:

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