Your professional growth journey so far
If you are typical well established subject matter expert (SME), you have spent the first years of your career focused on mastering technical skills in your knowledge area. Technical skills are, of course, your ticket to the game. Most employers look for technical capabilities first during the recruitment process.
But most SMEs aren’t aware that technical skills will only get you so far. The focus for many after establishing technical credibility and capability is to just add more – to focus their professional development on acquiring even more technical skills. This can lead to disappointment and frustration, with SMEs getting stuck in a technical bubble, and not being considered or invited for more interesting, broader strategic projects and work.
This is because what gets SMEs to the next level are enterprise skills. Many experts have either avoided developing these skills because they mistakenly felt these skills were not needed, or more likely have been offered very few opportunities to develop high level enterprise skills.
This is where the work of the Expertship Institute comes in.
What are enterprise skills?
Enterprise skills are a combination of non-technical skills that enable, when mastered and deployed, SMEs to dramatically increase their influence and impact. Some of these skills you may be familiar with and have previously described as “soft skills” – interpersonal skills, teaming skills, emotional intelligence, and presentation skills.
But the term enterprise skills describe a much broader set of critical capabilities than these. For example:
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Developing stakeholder engagement skills is a crucial part of a higher-level experts’ work.
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Elevated collaboration skills enable SMNEs to work seamlessly with technical and non-technical colleagues from around the organisation.
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Advanced networking and intelligence gathering skills enable SMEs to both be visible and understand what is going on in their organisation and the wider marketplace in which their organisation operates.
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The ability to prioritise time and energy effectively and manage expectations among many stakeholders competing for your time is also an under-valued critical skill. Doing this well means SMEs spend the right amount of time on the right things for the right reasons, avoiding being distracted by less important work that others could do.
Added to these skills sets are a series of capabilities many SMEs don’t believe are part of their job description, but in fact are essential to them being able to find the time and space to work on higher order value creation. These are:
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Market context describes the ability to deeply understand the environment in which your organisation works. This includes familiarity with the needs and motivations of customers or citizen that the organisation serves. SMEs can’t contribute to significant innovation unless they have this deep knowledge.
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Value Impact describes the ability for SMEs to have a clear sense of how and where they can create qualifiable additional value, now and in the future. This includes understanding how value is measured by the organisation (and the marketplace).
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Change Impact describes not just the ability to design change (be a catalyst) but also mastering the skills to be a change leader and a change supporter.
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Knowledge Transfer describes the ability of SMEs to help their stakeholders build their own capability. So many SMEs are the go-to person for fixing problems in their knowledge domain, and this gets in the way of being able to work on higher order tasks or projects. Being a highly competent mentor, coach, learning designer and facilitator are core enterprise skills – ones that few experts have taken the time to master and prioritise.
Our mission is to help
The Expertship Institute was established with the mission to assist all subject matter experts get to the highest level of influence and impact possible by assisting them add mastery of enterprise skills to their already finely honed technical skills.
We do this in a number of ways (see links to relevant pages at the bottom of this article):
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Illumination. We have a series of assessments that help experts assess to what extent they are trapped in their technical bubble such as the Expert Trap Test, a free comprehensive self-assessment tool, and a paid-for multi-stakeholders assessment, the world #1 feedback tool for subject matter experts, the Expertship360.
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Free resources. You’ll find a wealth of articles in the , and free chapter downloads from our publications on this site. And feel free to ask us questions.
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Free access to our AI mentor – Alix. Alix is in beta version at the moment but fully functional and can offer you generic advice on how to build your enterprise skills.
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Publications. The Expertship Institute principals have published two reference books that operate as go-to textbooks for how to significantly increase your expertise, influence and impact. These are Master Expert and the Expertship Growth Guide. They are low cost powerful investments in your professional growth.
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SME Coaching. Most experts we work with find investing in some sessions with an Expertship Institute-accredited Expertship coach highly valuable. Rather than generic advice on building your enterprise skills, a properly qualified human coach can help you identify highly customised initiatives that suit your situation and address your unique opportunities. Most SMEs we work with negotiate with their employer to fund these sessions.
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Courses. The Institute, through its various delivery partners worldwide, offers both face-to-face and virtual, in-house and public programs to help SMEs reach their full potential. Our signature global program is called Mastering Expertship and now boasts thousands of graduates.
Getting started
We suggest you get started by taking Expert Trap Test. This will tell you to extent to which you need to elevate advanced enterprise skills, and which ones to focus on as a priority.
Or you can contact us for a free consultation with one of our Expertship coaches.
Most important of all – just get started!
