I continued my bookcase building at the weekend, completing the top, sides and the back (just a little more polishing - one evening - and it'll be ready to assemble in the house. It's too big to assemble in the workshop and carry it to the house without the risk of damaging it). And during all of this I was thinking more and more of the apprenticeship model to extract key experiences and knowledge out of our key experts. The more and more I think about it the more and more I realise from my experience in this field that adopting an approach that was extremely successful (and still is) in passing on fine hand skills will not be appropriate to business experts.
Why do I state this:
Well apprenticeships is all about initial learning and perfecting eye hand co-ordination, problem solving, efficiency of working and learning a trade
I feel the idealised view some people have of the old and current apprenticeship systems ignores the fact that it's has lot's of repetition and is dealing with kids who leave school at the earliest opportunity. Many of our experts left the education system at the latest opportunity (Post Doc)
I fear we must apply learning approaches that are more aligned to people with an academic education, as the list above will generally (even if some of them are needed for certain individuals) insult the expert to be's intelligence Teaching your grandmother to suck eggs is an often used English saying.
We need to find more subtle, and acceptable ways of transferring knowledge that provide the resident expert and their protégé a useful enough creative space to mould the whole approach to suit both their individual styles and be commensurate with the company aims.
So I'll be focusing on the coaching mentoring approaches as well as the idea of leaving digital footprints that may be followed by others (Blogs, etc)
At least that's today's thinking
