I recently found The Seven Stages of Expertise in Software Engineering.
- Stage 1: Innocent
- barely knowledgeable if at all
- Stage 2: Exposed
- seeking knowledge
- Stage 3: Apprentice
- has read case studies and tries to apply those techniques
- Stage 4: Practitioner
- can actually apply concepts learned in one context to a not-identical context
- Stage 5: Journeyman
- professional understanding and application of the field; can mentor
- Stage 6: Master
- moved from “whats” and “hows” to “whys”; can mentor very effectively
- Stage 7: Researcher
- the teacher, presenter, mentor, speaker, evangelist, writer, authority
Presented firstly in the humorous guise of The Seven Stages of Expertise in Bear Hunting, Meilir Page-Jones makes a highly-compelling case for progressive advancement in [nearly] any field.
Some of the ideas seem similar to what Malcolm Gladwell brings in Outliers (review) or Robert Greene does in Mastery (review). Which seems to only lend more credence to those other works, given that this article is © 1998.