During interviews or in professional contexts, there often comes a moment when you need to highlight your ability to acquire new knowledge rapidly – an aspect known as learning fast. However, not many people know how to articulate this skill correctly. As it stands, the unsubstantiated trait of being a fast learner or possessing a high speed of learning can leave hiring managers indifferent. Smart hiring managers need tangible proof or figures behind the claims of accelerated learning. Providing concrete evidence makes your claims more credible and prompts hiring managers to inquire how you achieved it. This can be a...

We live in a content-driven world. Content has exploded in the last decade. The disciplines have become complex. The issues faced by businesses and society have multiplied by several folds. Tons of research studies have been conducted by scholars. Practitioners bring new business frameworks into the market. The compound effect of these forces is that most academic and professional programs are now loaded with a vast amount of content that students are expected to master. Graduates and professionals alike are expected to learn massive content, books, and theoretical and practical information and be able to show a good amount of...

Some years back, I got into an interesting discussion with an older man. He commented that anyone could be intelligent, but few possess wisdom. That was quite a point. From that point onwards, I have been looking at the journey of self-exploration and how we view ourselves on the spectrum of learning. As you engage in continuous learning, you keep evolving your understanding and skill levels, and you leap the new levels. The question becomes, where do you stop where you are on this spectrum? KNOWLEDGE: Develop strategic knowledge Get a competitive edge over others by expanding your strategic knowledge...

This article aims to summarize 9 unique characteristics (abilities) displayed by experts that differentiate them and represent their expertise. Taking about expertise and accelerating time to expertise, three basic questions are raised: 1) What makes experts so special? 2) What characteristics set experts apart from the rest of us? 3) What traits or abilities define expertise? In the last several posts, I focussed on skill development towards a higher level of expertise and how to accelerate progress towards expertise. While some of those posts like 5 Training Guidelines for Skill Acquisition Towards Unconscious Competence, Mastery Demystified: How Do the Skills of...

This article describes 7 models from research to explain the stages of a novice to expert transition and to guide the curriculum to advance the learners to the next level of expertise. One of the challenges training and learning designers face is developing curricula and strategies that are meant to advance the learners towards a higher level of expertise in skills learned. The journey of the learner, especially the novice to expert transition is a fascinating topic and training professionals love to create their own unconfirmed theories on such a topic. There are a number of theories that attempt to...

Multiple views on Dreyfus & Dreyfus’s (1986) model explain the characteristics of 7 phases of development any newbie experiences to become a domain expert and beyond. The process of skill development that could explain how a novice develops mastery in certain specific skills, has attracted a great research focus for a long while. To demystify this, in an earlier post, “7 Phases of Skill Acquisition: Mastery and Beyond on Dreyfus’s Model” I expanded the definitions and characteristics of the 7 stages specified by Dreyfus & Dreyfus (1986, 2001, 2008) model by combining perspectives and explanations from various thought leaders and researchers....

How do you turn into a high-performance individual? How do you become the best at something? There are several theories for this. During our research, we found that there were three distinct and completely different mechanisms through which professionals are able to do their best and able to shine as high-performance individuals. Let me share an interesting experiment. A select set of employees were given a pre-defined task that they had never done before. These employees were picked for research purposes and supposedly had demonstrated similar levels of skills, experience, and knowledge on similar kinds of assignments as seen from the...