The Skill Code

From one of the world’s top researchers on work and technology comes an insightful and surprising guide to protecting your skill in a world filling with AI and robots.Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it?Whatever your job – plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon – decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learning-school and books-gave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert.Today, this essential bond is under threat. In our grail-like quest to optimize productivity with intelligent technologies like AI and robots, we are separating junior workers from experts in workplaces around the world. It’s a looming multi-trillion-dollar problem that few are addressing, until now.Inand The Skill Code, researcher and technologist Matt Beane reveals the hidden code that underwrites every successful expert-novice relationship. Beane has spent the last decade examining this unique bond in a variety of settings, from warehouses to surgical suites. He’s found that just as the four amino acids are the building blocks of DNA, the three C’s-challenge, complexity, and connection-are the basic components of how we develop our most valuable skills.Whether you’re an expert or a novice, this book will show you how to build skill more effectively – and how to make intelligent technologies part of the solution, not the problem.and The Skill Codeand is an insightful must-read, with significant implications for how we will work and build skill in the twenty-first century-a guide to help you not only survive but thrive.