5 Steps to Transfer Your Expertise

I quit my job in February...had I known what was about to unfold, I likely would have made a different choice. But, I made my decision and haven't looked back since.

My co-worker at the time was a man who could easily have been an expert in many things. He certainly had the education and experience (as he never failed to remind me) to be considered an expert in our area.

What he failed to understand, and what many other "experts" also fail to understand is that expertise means very little if you lack the ability to transfer that expertise to other people. You can have all sorts of details and minutiae about incredibly complex and unique ideas, but if you aren't able to get those details across to others in a way that makes sense to them, then your expertise means very little.

What seems blindingly obvious to you may not be so obvious to everyone else, especially when you are talking about an area in which you might be an expert.

If you are an expert, how do you talk about your expertise in a way that makes it accessible to everyone? It's not as easy as you might think, but it can be done when you consider these ideas:

1) Assume that people only have a basic understanding of your subject. I am a disaster, emergency, and continuity management consultant by vocation and a writer by profession. When I write about disaster, emergency, and continuity management, I never assume that people have any significant understanding of what I actually do.

Unless I'm speaking to a group of my peers, I assume that my audience doesn't really understand more than the basic concept of what I do. I can trust that they know the basic concepts of hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, and other disaster, but I don't assume anything more than that. As a result, I know that I have to explain most of the basic concepts every time that I'm talking about the work that I do. This means that I am responsible for ensuring everyone is on the same page before I get into the depths of my expertise.

If I, as the expert, am speaking above somebody's level and haven't taken every step possible to ensure that they have the basic level of knowledge, then that is my fault - not theirs.

2) Develop an Elevator Pitch. The concept of an elevator pitch comes from the business world where people would develop a short, effective explanation of an idea or concept that they could deliver during a short elevator ride. This isn't as easy as it sounds, especially when you're dealing with deeply inter-connected and complex ideas.

A good elevator pitch should grab the listener's attention, be short enough that you could deliver it during a 20-30 second elevator ride (keeping in mind that you still need to get the other person's attention and interest, as well as get their permission to talk for a minute. My elevator pitch for my area of expertise is only two words longer than the name of the sector itself, a total of seven words.

I plan for things to go wrong.

With those seven words, I've given enough information to understand what it is that I do, the scope of my sector and expertise, and given an opportunity for the other person to ask for more information. I can give you enough information in seven words that you can follow along with what I'm about to say next.

3) Always Start From the Beginning. No matter what you're talking about, or who you are talking about it with, always start from the beginning. Part of what made my former co-worker so frustrating was that he would jump into the middle of a concept or idea and assume that everyone knew what he was talking about. There were times when even I didn't know what he was talking about until he got five minutes into talking.

While the connection seemed obvious to him, it definitely wasn't obvious to the rest of us - and it drove our boss nuts. She would regularly stop him and ask him to start from the beginning so that everyone was in the same place. What he didn't understand is that our responsibility as the experts was to walk people through every step so that they could reach the same conclusion we did. We can't just assume that people will take our word as gospel, especially when it comes to dealing with people's lives.

4) Listen to the Non-Experts in the Room. I spent a number of years as a volunteer firefighter and first responder, and will never forget a lesson I learned with a certain amount of embarrassment about listening to those who aren't the experts. I was in an auto extrication training course, where we would learn how to safely remove people from wrecked cars - or more commonly, to remove wrecked cars from around people.

We'd spent some time learning about how to safely operate the tools, the theory behind vehicle construction, and how the structure of cars changes during a crash. It was now time for us to go "hands-on" and use the fancy tools. My group got to our first station where we were presented with a car and told to extricate the "people" in the car.

We got everything fired up, worked out a plan of attack where we had a primary plan and no less than three backup plans. Just as we were about to start cutting into the car, the instructor called 'freeze', indicating that there was a safety problem. As we'd been instructed, we all stopped in place until the instructor told us to step back and put the tools down.

After the hydraulic pumps had been turned off, allowing us to talk, the instructor asked us the world's most basic question: 'Did anyone try the door handle?'

Of course none of us had. The instructor walked over to the car and opened the door with no problem at all.

There we were, the newly minted "experts" and none of us had thought through the practical, non-expert solution. Sometimes it pays to listen to those who aren't experts - their feedback and ideas can help us identify the weaknesses in our "expert" solutions and places where we need to communicate better in order to get our expertise across.

5) Never Stop Learning. Unless you are an expert in something like Latin, the odds are that your sector is changing on an almost daily basis. There are new technologies, new theories, analyses of old incidents, improvements in processes and procedures, and lots of other changes that happen in every sector on a regular basis. Your expertise is only as good as its "best before" date. You might be an expert in Adobe's Flash software, but that won't do you much good when Flash is officially retired at the end of 2020.

Expertise needs to regularly grow and be updated, or else it just becomes knowledge. This isn't something that you can expect others to do for you, it has to be a deliberate and managed process. You need to be aware of changes in your sector and how they affect your knowledge and expertise. You need to know how to relate events in your sector to events in other sectors, particularly ones with whom you work regularly.

You also need to know what you don't know - and that's a whole other article. The best way to never stop learning is to listen to other experts in your field and as many other field as you can think of. Then, consider how their expertise may affect your knowledge and expertise - find the weaknesses in your knowledge and then try to shore them up.

It is fantastic that you have expertise, especially when it is needed, but if you can't transfer your expertise to somebody else, then it doesn't really do much good. These five steps will help you learn how to understand your expertise and share it in practical and helpful ways.