Publish at February 08 2022 Updated February 17 2022
These days, the web is teeming with "experts." As soon as it is possible to sell something to a naive person on the Internet, you find a cohort of experts of all kinds.
So are these experts as strong as they claim?
An expert can be defined as a person who has exceptional skills in a particular field.
The expert is a person, often, passionate about his or her field of activity. He or she has not been content with just knowing how to do things well but has always wanted to go further and experience new and novel situations. The expert sees his or her learning as incomplete because there are always questions that he or she will imagine to challenge himself or herself.
Gaining expertise in a particular area of skill requires time and a significant personal investment. In this article, mention had been made of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model, which broke down the phases of skill acquisition into 5 stages.
The Dreyfus model was developed by the Dreyfus brothers; Stuart, the mathematician, and Hubert, the philosopher. They published a work in 1980 entitled "A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition" which can be translated as: A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition.
The more proficient a learner becomes in an activity, the less dependent he or she is on abstract rules and the more reliant he or she is on concrete experience. This progress is most evident in the way he perceives the task environment. This environment can be a real situation, such as positioning a web page at the very top of the search engine for a specific query, or a theoretical problem to be solved, such as an exam like the CESEO offered by SEO-Camp.
The Dreyfus model is useful for determining a learner's progress. It is also useful for each learner to reflect on their own level of learning using this model. In this sense, it allows for tagging.
Let's see what these 5 stages are:
1-. Novice
In the first stage, a learner has learned theoretical basics. Outside of a specific context, he or she knows what to do and can apply some learned processes.
At this stage the learner has no experience in the environment. Therefore, the learning process begins by decomposing the learning environment into out-of-context features that the beginner can recognize without needing experience in that environment. These features are also called non-contextual features.
Then, rules are given to the learner to determine actions based on features. To improve, the actions must be observed, whether it is self-learning or feedback from an instructor. Thus, his actions become more and more in line with the rules.
An SEO or writer who specializes in web semantics who is learning SEO may be considered a beginner if he knows rules for structuring a page to improve his search engine positions. They may seem abstract to him and therefore useless, but if he applies them in appropriate situations, he gets sometimes significant results.
2-. Advanced Beginner
To be in this second stage, the learner must have already faced a few real-world situations in which he or she has learned important and recurring patterns. These situational patterns, through which the learner learns to know his environment better, are no longer the out-of-context characteristics of the beginner. They enable him to plan his action in advance and acquire a routine.
As a result of increasing experience, he is able to respond flexibly to tasks.
The learner has become a beginner in his field when he no longer performs actions without understanding their meaning. At this stage, he perceives situations and can perform simple tasks in appropriate situations. They then produce effects because of their meaning.
For SEO, for example, the learner will be able to optimize a Title tag based on the keyword for which he or she wants the article to be referenced.
3-. Competent
The competent person is able to properly assess a situation and react by prioritizing among the various work steps.
He or she is able to use general guides and adapt them to the task at hand. He or she is also able to recognize deviations from the normal pattern of the situation and can cause them if necessary. Taking the risk of provoking deviations and learning from them distinguishes the competent professional from the beginner.
At this stage an SEO learner:
4-. Performing
The performing professional has a deeper understanding of the situation and more experience. He no longer relies solely on models, but through his repertoire of experienced situations, he finds the appropriate actions to implement.
He can also quickly grasp and master particular situations. In addition, he takes an analytical approach when confronted with a new problem.
To continue with the example of learning SEO, the successful professional will know how to evaluate the return on the actions he has implemented and eventually remedy the causes of their failure. If for a query the search results are frozen, he will know that another strategy may be preferable to adopt. The skilled professional will know if a page can appear in the top results by taking into account the search intent that Google associates with the user's query.
5-. Expert
The expert may, in the course of his or her activity, experience moments when he or she is totally absorbed by it and his or her performance exceeds even their usual high level. The expert sometimes even ceases to be aware of his performance.
All the mental energy that would previously have been invested in monitoring performance is then used to engage almost instantaneously in the correct action.
The expert senses things because, even unconsciously, he gathers all the information available to deal with a problem situation. In parallel to his usual procedures, a mental process will bring forth novel and creative solutions that will exceed all hoped-for objectives.
This stage can only be developed through sharp skills and extensive experience with very different situations.
The expert is distinguished from the successful professional by his ability to solve complex situations.
An expert is never satisfied with what he or she knows or can do. Despite his high level of knowledge and mastery of his field, he will remain modest and rarely call himself an expert, or as is fashionable, a guru. So beware of those who give themselves that status.
Expertise is often recognition by one's peers. If you ask a panel of SEOs who the French-speaking experts are, you will inevitably get the same names coming up. Recognition is often acquired through a contribution to the profession:
It is also questionable whether a large community on social networks is a testimony of real expertise.
First of all, is this a necessary condition? To continue with the SEO example, some expert people prefer to live from their passion without wanting to be visible. They start from the principle: "Let's live happily, let's live hidden". If this is possible for SEO, for other fields of expertise, experts sometimes need to be visible. In some cases, the answer is YES, real experts have visibility and large communities.
Is this a sufficient condition? When we sometimes see the profile of some people and the community they manage to create for themselves, we may wonder about their expertise, unless they are precisely experts in community building. To this question, it seems common sense to say that it takes more to demonstrate expertise.
If you want to become an expert, pay attention to the stage you are in according to the Dreyfus model, it is a good way to evaluate yourself.
If you are around someone you think is an expert in a field, also think about the different stages of the model and the ways to recognize an expert person described above.
And to answer the title question, most of these experts are often advanced beginners.
Sources
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus, "A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition," University of California, Berkeley, 1980.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235125013_A_Five-Stage_Model_of_the_Mental_Activities_Involved_in_Directed_Skill_Acquisition
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