Accelerating expertise: Principles for coach developers

Accelerated Expertise was produced to address military training requirements, to shorten the amount of time for new recruits to complete basic training, be assigned to the most appropriate branch of the military and then focus on their particular tasks until they became ‘useful’. Many companies and organisations have realised when long-term employees leave, whether through retirement or changing jobs, they are losing valuable contextual knowledge about how to perform their role. Transferring knowledge from one domain to another or from one context to another is one of the skills attributable to experts. Knowledge retention is the process of absorbing information over time and the ability to access and apply it when needed, another skill attributed to expertise. More recently in the UK and USA there has been a deliberate denigration of expertise in favour of sound bites, media spin and hostility towards intellectuals.