In phase 1 to gain knowledge, you can also take the lead to take work other don’t like/want to approach. This way, you will gain unique set of knowledge.

Actually teaching to expertise is one of the things I wanted to talk about when I started my blog.

Cheers,
Ian

I’m @charleslau from Twitter.

Now I can fully understand why you were asking about the mathematical question and I can only give you the havard business link. :)

I agree with you that teaching is the way to push yourself to learn even more from different angles! I can still remember the days when I teach my friends who are weak in their programming projects.. I realize that the more that I teach, the more I just get better with my understanding!

Today, blogging is a way of pushing ourselves to learn even more although we are expressing our understanding about a certain topic. It forces us to do some research to find out some of the things in order to complete the article in our blog post.

Great post! Will be learning from you more often through your blog! :)

Just as internships are a great way to expand our knowledge, I agree that teaching is also a valuable tool. Often, we don’t realize just how much we know about something, or how strong our passion is, until we share it with someone else. Great post!

Being in the Engineering profession, I am all too familiar with Phase 2. Peers often develop projects on an individual basis. After “completion”, the results must be communicated to the entire group and then each respective member is as informed as the researcher. This pivotal step finds flaws and opens new paths. Even talking to a brick wall can sometimes have the same effects, to a lesser degree.

If organizations embraced this philosophy of exploration and communication – and gave people the freedom to do so – I expect it would soon employ a wide variety of experts.

Being from the older Gen X set, in college we were told that you should not job hop because it looks bad on your resume. While I can understand that job hopping can look on paper like a lack of dedication, to me it could say that the person likes to try new things. And, if I was hiring for a consultant type position, this is exactly the type of person I would want to have on my team. Luckily, it seems that this stigmatism has dissipated greatly in the past 5 to 10 years.

Also related to action…people sometimes forget that work is not the only place where you can learn key leadership and other business-type skills. There are many local social and service organizations that will give you first hand leadership and business skills for free—well, you will have to donate a small amount of your free time.

If more people would take the action and teaching approach to becoming experts, I think meetings at my company would be a lot shorter!

A number of years ago I started a user group for PHP developers, a group where I presented 90% of the time. It absolutely helped me become very knowledgeable in a very short time.

The secondary benefit was that by leading and teaching the group I was perceived as an expert, leading to many job opportunities.

So teaching is not only good to help you learn something better, but it’s a fabulous credibility indicator. Of course if you really don’t know what you’re teaching it can certainly backfire.

Lots of people ask how I know all this or how I got to have all this info. I tell them it isn’t that I bump all this info around in my brain, I just make logical assumptions and then verify.

@ Royce – Thanks for sharing that quote and link! Really love that. Character is certainly underrated and I enjoy seeing this idea in other places as well : )