What you do well feels normal to you.
You have done it for so long that you may not notice how much judgment is involved.
For experienced professionals
You have years of experience. The hard part is knowing what’s worth building from it.
You have solved hard problems, made judgment calls, spotted patterns, and learned things your job title cannot explain.
I help you look at the evidence in your real work to find what is valuable, who it could help, and what is worth exploring next.
Free · About 10 minutes
This may sound familiar
You do not need more ideas. You need a better way to choose.
You could write a book. Create a course. Offer consulting. Build a workshop. Start a newsletter.
Or turn your experience into something you have not thought of yet.
The problem is not that you have no options.
The problem is that none of those options tells you which part of your experience is worth building around.
Your résumé only shows the surface.
It tells people what you did. It rarely shows how you knew what to do.
You have more than one possible direction.
Your career may contain several kinds of expertise. They are not all equally useful to build from.
You do not want to waste months on the wrong idea.
You want a reason to choose one direction over another.
The better question is not: What could I make?
It is: What does my experience show is worth testing?
Start with the evidence, not the format.
A course, book, workshop, service, or tool is a way to deliver value. It is not where you need to start.
First, look at the work you have already done.
- Where do people trust your judgment?
- What do you notice that others miss?
- Which decisions have become second nature to you?
- Where have you solved the same kind of problem more than once?
- What work do you want to keep doing?
- Who might need the result your expertise helps create?
Those answers give you something stronger than another product idea. They give you a reason to choose.
Find the value before you choose the vehicle.
How the work happens
Your career has already left clues.
The work is not about inventing expertise from scratch. It is about examining what experience has already taught you.
- 01
Make It Visible™
Find the expertise you have stopped noticing.
Look at real projects, hard decisions, repeated requests for help, mistakes, results, and moments when your judgment made a difference.
- 02
Make It Useful™
Figure out where that expertise could matter to someone else.
Look at what you do well, what you still want to do, who might need it, and what result it could help create.
- 03
Make It Work™
Put the idea under pressure.
Test your assumptions. Learn what real people need. Use what you find to decide what deserves more time, work, and investment.
You are not trying to reach perfect certainty. You are trying to make a better next decision.
Start where you are
You do not have to know exactly what you need yet.
I am still trying to figure out what I have.
Expertise Snapshot
Start with a short guided assessment of your real work. You will look for signs of expertise that are easy to miss when you use them every day.
Leave with one area of your experience worth examining more closely.
Free · About 10 minutes
I have something in mind. I want to know if it is worth pursuing.
Expertise Value Audit
Bring one area of your experience you think may have value. We will examine the evidence behind it, look at who it could help, and identify the strongest direction to investigate next.
Leave with a clearer reason to move forward, change direction, or keep gathering evidence.
Founding offer · $97
Explore the Expertise Value AuditHave a different expertise problem?
I also work with experts, teams, and organizations on selected knowledge, learning, and expertise projects.
About Shannon D. Smith
I look for the parts of expertise that experience makes easy to miss.
My background combines instructional design and industrial-organizational psychology.
For years, I have worked with experts whose knowledge had to become useful to someone else.
The most valuable part of what an expert knew was often the part they had the hardest time explaining.
I help experienced people go beneath the job title, résumé, and list of skills to examine the judgment behind their results.
M.S. Instructional Design & Technology
M.S. Industrial-Organizational Psychology
CPTD
The publication
Go deeper into how expertise actually works.
Untrap Your Expertise is where I study what experience teaches us.
I write about the hidden decisions behind good work, why experts struggle to explain what they know, how expertise develops, and what it takes to make that knowledge useful to someone else.
No generic list of product ideas. No promise that every skill should become a business. No pressure to quit a job you like.
Just a closer look at what experience has taught you and what may be worth doing with it.
Your career has already given you something to work with.
Start by finding the part worth a closer look.
Take the Expertise SnapshotFree · About 10 minutes