Earlier this week I was working on a project with two colleagues from work.  These two had spent a significant amount of time with the dataset we were working with, and it didn’t take long to realize that these two had a significant understanding of the intricacies of this data.

As we struggled to figure out a solution to our specific problem, one colleague said, “I feel like I should know more about be an expert at his point.”

His comment intrigued me and caused me to consider what an “expert” is.  We hear this term thrown around frequently, especially during this pandemic.  After thinking about his comment, I told him that I thought an expert was someone who has spent more time learning, understanding, and experiencing a topic than most folks.  Being an expert doesn’t mean we have all the answers (in my searching through definitions of expert, not one mentioned being all -knowing… that’s God’s domain!) it means we have knowledge, skill, and experience that we can apply to solve new problems and address new questions.

I told my colleague that definition would qualify him as an expert on the dataset we were working on.

We’re not required to have all the answers to be an expert, and we certainly don’t have to possess all the answers to offer our knowledge and experience to solve a problem.  So, the only expectation is that you share the knowledge, skill, and experience that you have.