It is a task that is easy to take up, but hard to finish. The problem arises from the fact that people can get nowhere fast, when trying to become an expert in a field. Some experts seem to know an eye-watering amount of things, and even after years of study and experience, you may feel that you simply cannot compete with them. The biggest and best tip that you will ever hear is that you need to be tenacious. You need to understand that becoming an expert takes years, and is a lifelong process. The moment you stop learning and trying is the moment you relegate yourself back down to a regular Joe. The world moves so fast that being an expert has to be maintained.
Time will remove experts who stand still
Can you imagine how far behind a programmer would be if he/she was still using C programming for everything. In the olden days a C programmer would be held in high esteem. But now a C programmer needs to know C++, C# and objective C. An expert would also need to understand Visual basic and preferably JavaScript too. Before Freud’s work was largely discredited, there were experts in his theories. If a person based most of their psychology discipline on Freud nowadays, nobody would call him/her an expert. To stop learning and to stop becoming an expert is the road to never being one.
Here is how to become an expert in your job field in 10 steps:
To become an expert you are going to have to take as many educational courses as you can, and you must take up new courses, as you get older, so that you can keep up to date with modern trends and technology. The more qualifications you have then the more attention people will pay when you tell them you are an expert.
There are people in your company and in your community who are veterans at what you are doing. They have done it for many years and even though they may not be experts, they will have advice that is valuable to you if you wish to be an expert.
The more experience you have with the job in hand then the more you will become an expert at it. You simply need experience if you wish to be a fully rounded expert.
This is very important; you need to write down your mistakes. You need to record the circumstances leading up to your mistake, the reasons for your mistake, the consequences of your mistake, and how you can ensure you never make that mistake again.
You need to find out as much as you can about the mistakes of others and record them. You need to apply their lessons to your life. Do not learn from the successes of others because nobody is every completely honest about how they achieved their success.
You will get chances to go on company events, learning tours, corporate excursions and learning seminars. Take them all--even if they seem like a pointless endeavor. You must strive to learn from them, even if all you learn is that those events do not do people any good.
The real experts are going to allow their work life to spill into their home life and personal time. Some of the books and TV shows they enjoy will be related to their profession. On the other hand, the people who allow work consume too much of their own time are doomed to a life of failure.
Nobody is going to be completely honest about every step you need to take to become an expert, but if you ask enough people, you will begin to build up a reasonable estimation of all the things you need to do to become an expert.
Planning to be an expert is clever if you set time limits. For example, you may plan to take a qualification, but you also need to set a time limit for when you must have started it by, and when you have finished it by; otherwise, your plan is nothing more than a wish list.
There is always more that you can do, you just need to research and find out what it is. Plus do not forget that times and industries change, to the point where new things appear all the time.