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. In 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. The Skill Code 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.
