Comments on: SME? Not for me

By: Harold Jarche » Learning at Work

Harold Jarche » Learning at Work — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:01:10 +0000

[...] my own contribution, SME? Not for Me, in which I ever so gently nudge people who design training, hoping to move them from [...]

By: Dave’s Whiteboard » Blog Archive » Getting to exemplary

Dave’s Whiteboard » Blog Archive » Getting to exemplary — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:54:05 +0000

[...] Subject-matter experts are often supervisors or specialists who don’t currently do the job for which they’re considered experts.Â Exemplary performers (exemplars), by contrast, do do that job, and are recognized as exemplary by peers and by management. [...]

By: Dave’s Whiteboard » Blog Archive » “Yeah, that works” — a good concept

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:37:11 +0000

[...] training (or facilitating learning) for higher-level, non-procedural jobs. I’ve written about exemplars before. Later this week, an example of working to uncover solutions about which exemplars say [...]

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:19:28 +0000

It’s especially useful to deal with an expert practitioner when you’re trying to close the gap between theory and practice, or when you’re outside the realm of mainly procedural tasks.

At a federal agency, John and I worked with exemplars to identify techniques they used to build effective working relationships with the outside contractors whose work they oversaw. The policy manual had flowcharts, but these sometimes resembled “how a bill becomes law” from your high-school civics class.

We were able to create case-study exercises for newcomers to this job, with guidance and feedback based on what successful performers had actually done.

By: Cathy Moore

Cathy Moore — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:11:57 +0000

Dave, thanks for pointing out this important distinction. “Expert practitioner” will help us get access to the most useful person. A nice benefit: Expert practitioners whose brains I’ve picked have been too busy to write anything for the course–the only written info I get from them is a copy of their personal cheat sheet. This helps make course development efficient, because when no one in the client organization has invested a lot of time “writing the course,” we don’t have to spend a lot of time rewriting and explaining our rewrites.