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What do all of these resources have in common? The answer: they’re drawn from the Naturalistic Decision Making branch of applied psychology. NDM does a lot of work for the military and healthcare. The researchers overlap quite a bit with human factors and resilience engineering.

The Oxford Handbook of Expertise (Oxford Library of Psychology)

So my first piece of advice is to look at NDM. The single resource that’s probably the most fruitful to dig into is The Oxford Handbook of Expertise:

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The study of expertise weaves its way through various communities of practice, across disciplines, and over millennia. To date, the study of expertise has been primarily concerned with how human...

But really the general recommendation to look at training systems or training research that’s been funded by the military is probably a good heuristic.

DARPA Digital Tutor: Four Months to Total Technical Expertise? - LessWrong

For instance: the DARPA digital tutor. Millions of dollars. Result: 16 weeks of technical training -> students outperformed practitioners with years of experience in the field.

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DARPA spent a few million dollars around 2009 to create the world’s best digital tutoring system for IT workers in the Navy. I am going to explain their results, the system itself, possible limitatio…

But of course military funded research doesn’t just result in better training methods in the military. Sometimes it funds results in sports science. Like Peter Fadde’s work on accelerating pitch recognition in baseball (later applied to tennis): peterfadde.com/projectspitchb

Quick summary: - You show tennis players video of a serve. - You black out the serve right before it connects. - You ask the player to identify the serve - Repeat 100s of times. - The tennis player gains expert level serve recognition quickly. - They can do this on iPhone.

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Anyway, my main point: - Want to learn how to learn in your career? Don’t pay as much attention to classroom based education research. - Unless it’s been applied in vocational training settings - Focus mostly on research that’s been done in applied domains

- The military has funded a huge amount of work into better training methods. - And they tend to not care as much about performance on tests. (They really care about transfer to real world performance) - So that’s one fruitful area to dig for ideas.

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The transfer point is similar to how combine tests in football don't seem to correlate to how successful you'll be in the NFL You can always optimize for the test. It's difficult to optimize in the field