We spend a lot of time looking around for expertise.
We interview for it, hire for it, promote it, put it on stages, and occasionally follow people pretending to have it on social media. Yet for all the value we place on finding people who know what they’re doing, we seem considerably less interested in how people become that way. We’d prefer they arrive fully developed, ideally within our salary range.
The problem is we’re stupid. We don’t grasp the reality of human growth or consider our role in it, especially when it comes to the workforce.
That’s why I try to think about anyone’s progress toward becoming an expert, and my role in helping them get there, through a simple lens: Exposure leads to Experience. Experience leads to Expertise.
Exposure. Experience. Expertise. They’re my three Xs of learning and growth. Yes, they begin with E. I work in marketing, so I’m allowed to do this. And three Xs just sounds cooler, dammit!
The progression might seem obvious until you start considering why and where it gets screwed up in almost every business. And it’s a paradox that happens every day in a multitude of situations that could be opportunities.
We want people to develop judgment, but we keep them out of conversations where judgment is exercised. Why? Because we’re not a school! Why would we pay them to train them?!?!
We want them to think more broadly, but give them the same narrow tasks and expectations. Why? Because those mundane, repetitive tasks are how we pay the bills! And because I don’t want to do it anymore. I’ve earned this!
Eventually, we sit down at review time and ask why they haven’t grown and why they’re so drained of life, as though something transformative and enlightening should have happened while they were mindlessly updating a spreadsheet and repeating their assignments over and over and over.
So, as everyone freaks out about AI taking entry-level jobs, let’s rethink the role of people in those jobs. Not in terms of their machine-like productivity — because rote tasks are all we’ve entrusted them with — but as people without experience who are getting much-needed exposure, which is the whole reason we pay them less.
The old way of thinking — “It’s how I learned and got ahead!” — is not relevant anymore. Pay attention; times are changing.
Everyone’s human growth needs something to work with, and exposure is where that begins; with an idea, discipline, problem, perspective, or possibility beyond what they already know. Maybe they sit beside somebody more experienced or listen to two senior people argue about a decision and realize there are three dimensions to a problem they thought only had one. Suddenly, or more likely progressively, their understanding expands enough to reveal how much they haven’t understood.
But being in the room is only part of it. You can watch a creative director choose one idea over another without understanding what informed their choice. The decision is visible; the thinking behind it often isn’t. When that person explains what they noticed, what concerned them, and why an apparently wonderful idea might fall apart in the real world, someone else gains access to the judgment behind the answer, and you’ve begun giving them the ability to make a decision, the experience.
That’s the kind of exposure I’m interested in creating. The kind that gives people something they can begin to use, question, and test through experiences of their own.
Those experiences become valuable when we stop, take stock, and actually talk like humans. What did we miss? What did you see? What did you feel? Why did the approach work with one person and fail with another? What would we change next time?
Consider the person who has watched a few difficult client conversations and now has to lead part of one. Suddenly, they have to interpret a response, choose what to pursue, and recognize when the answer they prepared belongs to a question nobody asked. The conversation becomes theirs to navigate, and with enough support, that interaction won’t set the account on fire. We can develop people without making the client an unwilling participant.
Repetition gives us more opportunities to learn, but it also gives us opportunities to become remarkably comfortable doing something badly. Over time, we begin recognizing what deserves attention, thought, effort, collaboration, or a table flip. We notice the question beneath the question, the familiar solution that doesn’t fit, or the small detail that changes our interpretation of everything around it. That’s how I’d describe the progression: Exposure teaches us what’s possible. Experience teaches us what happens. Expertise teaches us what matters.
And now here’s an uncomfortable question about how we’re changing work: What the hell are you actually doing to help?
The responsibility is on those of us who already have expertise, not those seeking it. We love telling younger people to find a mentor, network, ask questions, lean in, put time on my calendar, or put yourselves out there, but there’s something slightly absurd about placing all the responsibility for access on the person who has the least of it. Someone with authority can make an introduction, explain a decision, or invite a less-experienced colleague into a conversation that would otherwise remain closed to them. Those are small choices from one side of the relationship and potentially significant opportunities from the other.
This also means taking our knowledge beyond the people who happen to work beside us. Teaching, mentoring, visiting classrooms, and participating in communities can expose someone to a field they didn’t know was available to them. We can’t expect people to pursue possibilities they’ve never encountered, and we shouldn’t confuse a lack of exposure with a lack of potential.
We’re all going to keep using AI in place of inexperienced workers and eventually turn back to realize we burned the fields behind us. And it’s because we were too lazy, short-sighted, and egotistical to help, consider another’s experience, and expose them to what we have to offer.
Or, we can take what we’ve learned and let it become useful in another way when we make our thinking accessible and give someone room to develop their own. What we’ve experienced becomes a shared human experience when we get off our butts and go provide our experience and expertise to others, giving more humans access to more human experience, which should in turn inspire more exposure and we keep connecting and building together.
We can keep pursuing the next opportunity, the harder problem, and the greater understanding. I hope we do, but somewhere along the way, leadership asks us to remember how much an invitation, an explanation, or a little trust can change what becomes possible for another person – or an entire generation. You’ve made it a few floors up. You ought to remember to send the elevator back down before it’s too late.