# Skills and Expertise: The Difference, and How One Becomes the Other Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-expertise/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-expertise.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Skills are what you can do; expertise is a skill taken deep enough to set you apart. See the five stages between them, and how to place and grow your own. ## Key facts - Title: Skills and Expertise: The Difference, and How One Becomes the Other - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Influence, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: skills and expertise - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-expertise/ ## What this page covers - Skills are what you can do; expertise is a skill taken deep enough to set you apart. See the five stages between them, and how to place and grow your own. - Practical guidance for skills and expertise - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Skills and expertise are related but not the same. A skill is something you can do. Expertise is what a skill becomes when you develop it, along with the knowledge around it, far enough to set you apart from novices and less experienced people. Most people have many skills and genuine expertise in only a few areas, and early in a career, those few areas are usually still forming. That last point matters if a resume heading or an interview question has asked for your skills and expertise and you were not sure you had any expertise to name. The problem is rarely a lack of ability. It is the lack of a way to tell where each of your skills actually stands, and there is a useful map for exactly that. ## What separates a skill from expertise Expertise is not a different kind of thing from skill. It is skill and knowledge taken to a depth that distinguishes you from people doing the same activity with less experience. The real question is what produces that depth, because time alone does not. The research of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson on expert performance draws the line clearly. Everyday skills follow a predictable path: you learn them, they become automatic, and once they are good enough to run on autopilot, your performance stops improving. Expertise keeps developing only because the person keeps working beyond that comfortable, automatic level. Ordinary repetition no longer stretches a skill you can already do without thinking. That has a direct consequence for you. Years of doing something do not automatically add up to expertise: experience gives you fluency, but only continued, targeted effort gives you depth. It also means a narrow area you have worked on intensively, such as a research method from your thesis or a tool you used every day in a student job, can carry real depth even when your overall experience is short. Expertise is also specific to a domain. Practicing one skill develops that skill, not a general ability, so the same person can be an expert in one area and a beginner in another. That holds at every career stage. If you picture the experienced people around you as expert across the board, that picture is common, and it rarely survives contact with real work. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described the moment it changed for her: > I thought people at work just knew everything — why they did things and how, always the best way. Then I found out that someone fully grown, who has worked for twenty years, can be in doubt about plenty. Brilliant at some things and not at all at others. That is not a weakness in experienced people; it is how expertise works. And it applies to you just as much. You will hold different skills at different stages, which is why the useful question is not "Do I have expertise?" but "Which of my skills sits where?" ## The five stages between skills and expertise A practical map for that question is the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, developed by Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus at UC Berkeley around 1980. It holds that people learning a skill through instruction and experience pass through five stages: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient and expert. The thread running through all five is a shift away from rules and abstract principles toward concrete experience and an intuitive grasp of the situation. Because each stage has its own signature, the model lets you place each of your skills honestly instead of sorting yourself into "has expertise" or "has none." ### Novice The novice learns rules that apply regardless of context and follows them to the letter. Performance is slow and rigid, because the rules are all there is: the novice cannot yet read a situation well enough to see when a rule does not fit. Think of your first weeks with a new piece of software, following the guide step by step and getting stuck the moment the screen looks different. Every skill starts here, and there is nothing embarrassing about it. ### Advanced beginner With experience, you start to notice meaningful aspects of situations that no rule covers. From examples you have seen, you begin to recognize that a certain kind of question usually signals a certain kind of problem, or that one type of meeting calls for a different tone than another. You still lean on rules, but concrete experience has started to do some of the work. If you have done something a handful of times in different settings, this is a likely place for it. ### Competent At the competent stage, the number of relevant factors becomes too large to handle by following rules, so you learn to choose a plan or perspective that decides what to focus on. That choice has a side effect: because you picked the approach, you feel personally responsible for how it turns out, and both successes and mistakes land harder. This is why early-career work can feel stressful even when you are doing it well. Responsibility arrives at this stage before intuition does. That is a sign of progress rather than of falling behind, and it is the stage that further practice carries you through. ### Proficient The proficient performer sees what is going on intuitively. They recognize the situation without having to analyze it, but they still work out deliberately what to do about it. A proficient analyst notices at a glance that a set of figures looks wrong, then reasons step by step toward the fix. Proficient is a sensible threshold for calling a skill expertise on a resume or a profile: you can see the situation, not just follow the procedure. ### Expert The expert both sees the situation and knows what to do, intuitively and without calculating. The rules have not disappeared; they have been absorbed into experience so deep that the right move presents itself. And expertise stays tied to its domain. An expert who picks up something new starts again near the beginning of the same five stages. ## How to place your own skills and expertise The stages are not a strict ladder. Real learning is uneven: you may move quickly through one skill and stall in another, and you will hold different skills at different stages at the same time. So an honest picture of your skills and expertise is a snapshot with several stages in it, not one overall level. Building it takes three moves. First, list what you can do. Include subject knowledge, tools and methods, and the workplace skills that govern how you handle people and yourself at work. Second, give each item a stage. The descriptions above make this concrete. Do you still need the instructions? Do you adjust to situations from experience? Do you choose your own approach and own the result? Do you see what is going on at a glance? Be honest in both directions. Calling a competent skill expertise invites questions you cannot answer, while filing a genuinely deep area under ordinary skills hides your strongest card. Third, attach evidence to anything you rate proficient or above: a finished piece of work, a result, or feedback from someone who relied on it. Evidence is what turns a claim into something another person believes. When a resume, a profile or an interviewer asks for your skills and expertise, lead with the one or two areas at proficient or above, each with its evidence, and list the rest as skills. A short, evidenced line of expertise says more than a long list of labels. The hardest items to place are usually the workplace skills, such as how you communicate, handle setbacks or manage your time, because no transcript grades them. That gap is easy to close: the free Job Skills Test can [benchmark those workplace skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and give you more precise language for them than a generic adjective. ## How a skill grows into expertise If the difference between a skill and expertise is depth, the next question is how depth gets built. Ericsson's answer is [deliberate practice](/knowledge/improve-skills/develop-new-skills/): practice that is structured, attentive, as effortful as you can make it, and followed by immediate feedback, usually from a coach or teacher. The quality of that practice matters more than the number of hours. Feedback is the engine. Without someone pointing out what to correct, practice mostly repeats the habits you already have. At work, the coach is rarely called a coach. It is usually your manager or an experienced colleague who will look at a real piece of your work and tell you specifically what to change. [Asking for that kind of feedback](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/ask-for-feedback-at-work/) on the one or two skills you want to deepen, rather than general feedback on everything, is the most direct way to keep a skill from settling into autopilot. Practice is not the whole story, though. The idea that deliberate practice is enough on its own to produce expertise has been challenged: in a 2014 paper, researchers Lombardo and Deaner argued that there are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to doubt it, because practice explains part of the difference between people's performance but not all of it, and starting abilities count too. That points to a practical choice. Deepen the skills where you already have some [natural strength](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/), because that is where practice pays off most. Because expertise is domain-specific, you also do not need to build it everywhere. One or two focused areas, chosen where a natural strength meets work that matters to the people around you, are enough to start with. Alongside them sits an honest acknowledgment that you are a beginner at plenty of other things. Everyone with expertise is. ## The skills that turn practice into recognized expertise Look back at what each of those moves asks of you. Rating yourself honestly, choosing where to dig in, staying with a skill past the point where it feels comfortable, and getting others to rely on the result have less to do with any subject than with how you handle yourself and the people around you. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes an honest inventory possible. It separates what you are genuinely good at from what you can merely do adequately, using questions about how you work, how a task makes you feel and what results you get. Specific feedback from people who see your work adds what you cannot see yourself: a strength you have been taking for granted, or one you have been rating a stage too high. **Influence** is how expertise becomes something other people act on. Part of it is a well-earned reputation: delivering results consistently and with integrity until you are known for something specific. Early in a career, that turns expertise from a label you claim into a reputation you earn one delivered piece of work at a time, which is exactly what makes a claim of expertise believable. **Building Confidence** is the belief that you can perform a specific activity, and it grows the same way expertise does: practice at each level before stepping up, challenges that stretch you a little at a time, and a growing body of evidence that you can do it. If you assume expertise belongs to other people, this is the skill that answers the doubt, not with positive thinking but with proof you collect yourself. Of the three, self-awareness is the easiest to start on today. The **free Job Skills Test** gives you [a first map of your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), twelve work skills in all with these three among them, so the skill you decide to deepen is chosen on evidence rather than a hunch. ## Depth you may already be building Some of this may already be happening without a name attached. If there is a task you once did step by step from instructions and now handle without checking, whether a method from your thesis, a tool from a student job or explaining a complex topic to someone new to it, you have already moved a skill up a stage, and you know what that progress feels like. Where your skills sit today is a position, not a verdict. Each one can move with practice and feedback, and none of it asks you to become someone other than yourself. The further your responsibilities reach, the more people will lean on the depth you have built rather than the breadth you list, so the useful next move is knowing which of your skills to take further. ## Choose the skill to deepen first All that remains is to pick where to begin. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes, it shows your strengths and gaps across twelve skills that shape how you work, and which of them will make the biggest difference as you turn skills into expertise. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Skills are what you can do; expertise is a skill taken deep enough to set you apart. See the five stages between them, and how to place and grow your own. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Influence, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-expertise/ Preferred summary: "Skills are what you can do; expertise is a skill taken deep enough to set you apart. See the five stages between them, and how to place and grow your own." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.