Learning from The Dreyfus model

For a IT professional, googling has become a mandatory skill for survival. As a tester when you find a critical defect by chance sometimes and feel blessed. similarly while googling for a specific topic, we find lots of stuff and suddenly something catches your eye and out of curiosity you dig deeper and find it very useful. I would like to share what I found and learned.

"The Dreyfus Model Experiment" in a blog from Cory Foy http://blog.coryfoy.com/2006/03/the-dreyfus-model-experiment/

As per the blog, the Dreyfus Model, it is a model of skills acquisition that describes how people progress in their knowledge. There are five levels to the model, summarized as:

• Novice – Needs to be told exactly what to do. Very little context to base decisions off of.
• Advanced beginner – Has more context for decisions, but still needs rigid guidelines to follow.
• Competent – Begins to question the reasoning behind the tasks, and can see longer term consequences.
• Proficient – Still relies on rules, but able to seperate what is most important.
• Expert – Works mainly on intuition, except in circumstances where problems occur

For me this is very important, because one of my responsibilities is to communicate with different teams, team members with both higher and lower experiences and skill sets. we most times assume that we know how to deal with it and read and here that it will come through experience. But this model gives us a reasonable model of communication with whatever level of co-worker we are dealing with.

In the environment and work culture where I work, I need to be aware when I am talking to a senior or junior and some times I have only 2 fixed ways. one for seniors and one for juniors. The dreyfus model gives me more flexibility. I will definitely implement this model and check the results.

Feel free to experiment if you too find it interesting and share.