Developing Expertise in Rehabilitation Professional Practice

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Original Editor - Ines Musabyemariya Top Contributors - Ines Musabyemariya, Kim Jackson and Carina Therese Magtibay

Introduction[edit | edit source]

Expertise is defined as the ability to perform at an excellent level in a specific task or field. Individuals who attain this status are referred to as experts, which means individuals whose performance is considered to be the best in their field.

Expertise is a journey that someone decide to take to reach an ultimate level of performance in a certain Field or task.

The field of rehabilitation is vast, as a rehabilitation professional, it is crucial to reflect on your daily work and seek ways to improve the lives of those you serve. This reflective practice may lead you to specialize in a particular field.

In order to attain a level of expertise, it is essential to go further into the field and understand the reasoning behind specific occurrences. This individual process is also aligned with your motivation for embarking on the journey for developing professional expertise.

How do you develop expertise in professional practice?[edit | edit source]

To be the rehabilitation professional requires to have the necessary qualifications and knowledge, typically obtained through degrees or certificates in rehabilitation field. However, to become an expert brings a deeper diving into a particular field to better serve the population, and this requires a combination of personal motivation, personal talent, cultural and environmental elements. Literature shows that developing expertise in a certain field of practice involves various strategies that are personal, but also contextual, and this is an ongoing contextualized and individualized experience.[1][2][3].In summary developing expertise is:

  • A learning journey that reflects on own practice,
  • Critical analysis and thinking of own practice,
  • Having curiosity to learn,
  • Know your motivation,
  • and consider socio-cultural construct.

Components of Expertise[edit | edit source]

The topic of expertise is quite complex and has been studied by researchers in various fields. There are five generalizations, or components that can be made about its nature[4][5][6]:

  1. Competence: skills and competences develop continuously with experience in a certain field. It's important to remember that people become more knowledgeable as they gain experience in a specific field.
  2. Contextual specific: It is crucial to understand that expertise in any given field is country and culturally specific.
  3. Identification of gap and problem perception: Experts have potential to identify crucial patterns on a broader scale, they possess the skill of recognizing significant patterns on a large scale.
  4. Process of acquiring and developing knowledge: It is also necessary to understand that experts possess a wealth of knowledge in a certain field, that was tested and confirmed throughout their professional practice.
  5. Problem solving: Experts develop sharp recognition and representation skills in order to be a more efficient problem-solver.

References[edit | edit source]

  1. ↑ Bourne LE Jr, Kole JA, Healy AF. Expertise: defined, described, explained. Front Psychol. 2014 Mar 4;5:186. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00186. PMID: 24624112; PMCID: PMC3941081.
  2. ↑ Wallin, A., Nokelainen, P. & Mikkonen, S. How experienced professionals develop their expertise in work-based higher education: a literature review. High Educ 77, 359–378 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0279-5
  3. ↑ Ericsson, K. (Ed.). (2009). Development of Professional Expertise: Toward Measurement of Expert Performance and Design of Optimal Learning Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511609817
  4. ↑ Chi, M.T.H., Glaser, R., & Farr, M.J. (Eds.). (1988). The Nature of Expertise (1st ed.). Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315799681
  5. ↑ Fox, S., & Leake, D. B. (2001). Introspective reasoning for index refinement in case-based reasoning. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 13(1), 63–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528130010029794
  6. ↑ Leighton, J. P., & Sternberg, R. J. (2003). Reasoning and problem solving. In A. F. Healy & R. W. Proctor (Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Experimental psychology, Vol. 4, pp. 623–648). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. https://doi.org/10.1002/0471264385.wei0423
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