The role of tacit knowledge in expertise

After reading the given topics and discussion with my group, I think of an expert in any field as a person who has attained super abilities to do certain task/s in a particular field over the general people trying to do the same task/s. Now it is very difficult to generalise that how far the tacit knowledge have played its role in making someone expert in a particular field. If we pick some of the experts from different fields, it can be inferred that a coaching by a skilled person is a crucial ladder in their success. Intuitively we can also say that there is at least some role of the tacit knowledge in expertise in every field. Now let us take two different situations, first, a person who have been coached since his early childhood like Lionel Messi (he has won player of the year(football) four times consecutively); second, a person who was coached relatively later after observing his great skills like Virender Sehwag.

In the first case, Lionel Messi started playing football at the age of 5 under his father’s guidelines who was himself a local football player. Since then he is under professional training. It is most likely true that he is at top of the world due to his coaching and tacit knowledge. But tacit knowledge plays the critical role because there are many who have received such coaching but may not have the tacit knowledge that Messi have. But in the case of Sehwag, he had gain attention later due to his tacit knowledge in cricket. Then he received a professional training and today he is an expert.

From the latter case we can conclude that tacit knowledge can play major role in expertise. If we see the first case,Lionel Messi may have used tacit knowledge to reach at the top of the world but it can be true that he would have been ended an expert but not at the top due to his training since his childhood without tacit knowledge. So we can also predict that tacit knowledge may not be needed for being an expert in some fields.

In the MITECS article on expertise, Anders Ericsson says “the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation”. Here he points out that the amount of experience and knowledge is not sufficient for being an expert but organizing that knowledge to tackle the problems in the future efficiently is very crucial part. We can think ‘organizing of knowledge’ as a tacit knowledge or implicit learning.