In November 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published a book called Outliers, examining the factors that lead to high levels of success. According to it, a person can become an expert if they spend a huge amount of time, approximately 10,000 hours, on top of their natural abilities, practicing their craft. However, it is not the amount of time but the way they spent their time while practicing that separates high performers from the rest. This is called deliberate practice, whereby an individual would zone in on their learning and minimize all distractions.
An expert is a person who has deep knowledge of a subject. The role of an expert will vary, depending on the nature of the industry and company.
An expert can be an athlete, an analyst, an engineer, a marketer dedicating large portions of their time to mastering their specific skillsets.
To be an expert, one will be required to have a consistent commitment to distilling knowledge, practicing what has been learned, and correcting wrong hypotheses. For example, a specialized doctor can be considered an expert, having done continuous education for about 10 years.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being an expert. For example, did you know that they make an average of $53.85 an hour? That's $111,999 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow -2% and produce -105,200 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many experts have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed persistence, selling skills and math skills.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be an expert, we found that a lot of resumes listed 21.1% of experts included procedures, while 10.9% of resumes included communication, and 9.8% of resumes included sales floor. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the expert job title. But what industry to start with? Most experts actually find jobs in the technology and retail industries.
If you're interested in becoming an expert, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 36.2% of experts have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 14.3% of experts have master's degrees. Even though most experts have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become an expert. When we researched the most common majors for an expert, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or high school diploma degrees. Other degrees that we often see on expert resumes include master's degree degrees or associate degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become an expert. In fact, many expert jobs require experience in a role such as sales associate. Meanwhile, many experts also have previous career experience in roles such as cashier or customer service representative.