2016 Annual Conference

Baby boomers are retiring faster than their Gen-X and Millennial replacements can be trained. Adult Educators and HRD professionals need tough cases to accelerate expertise to fill this gap since accumulating expertise conventionally takes too long. This session will operationally define tough cases and suggest how to use them.

Human Resources Development (HRD) professionals, executive coaches, and adult educators, and researchers should attend this session. It will fall to HR and Adult Educators to forestall the potentially negative fallout from impending workforce changes resulting from the transition of the baby boomers. Learning theorists (Hoffman 2009; Hoffman et al., 2010; Squires et al., 2011; Fuchs, Carpenter, Carroll, & Hale, 2011) argue "tough cases" can develop expert performance faster than mere experience accumulation. This session will present an operational definition of tough cases and suggest ways they could aid Adult Educators and professionals in accelerating expert development.

Baby boomer retirement and escalating talent wars in intellective professions, such as cybersecurity, are accelerating demand for 21st century skills (O’Neil, Perez, & Baker, 2014). Being discriminant, adaptive, reflective, and able to maintain contextual understanding of a dynamic reality increasingly determines expertise in action (Benner, 1982; Feltovich, Ford & Hoffman, 1997; Assante & Tobey, 2011). Companies are forced to replace retiring workers with recent graduates lacking significant work experience. A recent study by the National Research Council (2013) found the petroleum engineering workforce now averages less than two years of experience, precipitously down from an average of nearly ten years of experience in 2000.

Educators can help learners acquire knowledge, but skill development, the foundation of expert performance, requires deliberate practice (Tobey, 2012; Hoffman et al., 2010; Ericsson, 2006). Tough cases could play a key role in helping educators turn focused practice w ith feedback and scaffolding into expertise (see Klein and Baxter, 2009, for Cognitive Transformation Theory).

The session will provide an overview of the theories of accelerated expertise and the role played by tough cases, provide an operational definition of tough cases, suggest ways to elicit tough cases from experts, and provide an example of a tough case.