Expertise and Your Professional Career

This subject provides insights into professional knowledge, learning and expertise that will enhance students’ development in their chosen professions. The subject explores meta-frameworks for learning in all professions by distinguishing between different forms of knowledge, the relationships these have to practice across a broad array of fields, and the implications this has for learning. The focus is on the structures of knowledge and the way knowledge is produced in professions generally, rather than the content of knowledge in specific professions. It asks students to consider whether learning in academic disciplines and professions is the same, or whether differences in the structures of knowledge and the nature of practice require different approaches to learning. It distinguishes between professions that have emerged in the last fifty years and those that have an older lineage and queries whether they are different, and if so, how they are different. The subject considers debates about the relationship between theory and practice in the development of expertise in work by comparing and contrasting those that emphasise process and experiential accounts of learning with those that emphasise the intrinsic role knowledge plays in the development of expertise. The implications for debates about professional education are considered and students are asked to contemplate the significance of these debates for their own future career development.