The SME's Dilemma: You're the Expert, But You're Not a Trainer

You spent years becoming genuinely excellent at something. Colleagues seek you out because when something breaks, you're the one who understands why. And then someone decides this expertise should be “captured” or “transferred” or “scaled.”

Expertise and the ability to teach are treated as the same skill, but they're not. The best surgeon in a hospital isn't automatically the best person to train residents. Research shows expert practitioners often make poor instructors, precisely because their expertise has become automatic.

It's called the “curse of knowledge.” Once you know something deeply, you lose access to what it felt like not to know it. You skip steps without realizing. You use jargon that has become transparent to you but remains opaque to newcomers.

Being an expert requires deep domain knowledge, pattern recognition built over years, intuition about edge cases, and the ability to solve novel problems.

Being a trainer requires understanding how learning works, ability to sequence information for newcomers, comfort with public speaking, skills in facilitation, and patience with questions you find basic.

Some people have both skill sets. Most don't. Over half of L&D professionals cite getting SMEs to create training content as their biggest bottleneck. That statistic tells us something: we're asking the wrong people to do a task that isn't their job.

The standard approach is to “upskill” the SME: send them to presentation training, teach them instructional design basics, give them a template for building eLearning modules. This fails for three reasons.

First, it assumes the SME has time. They don't. Second, it assumes the SME has interest. Many don't. Third, it treats the symptom rather than the disease. The real problem isn't that SMEs lack training skills. It's that we've designed a knowledge transfer process that requires everyone to be a trainer.

What if we asked: how do we extract expert knowledge without requiring experts to perform? This reframe changes everything.

Think about what experts can do easily: tell stories about times things went wrong, answer specific questions about their domain, explain why something is a mistake and what they'd do instead, share the mental models they use to make decisions.

None of this requires standing in front of a room. All of it is natural conversation. The technology shift happening now means AI can take unstructured expertise and structure it into learning experiences. The expert becomes a source, not a performer.

Your value to the organization is your expertise, not your ability to present it. The goal should be getting your knowledge to others, not getting you to perform that knowledge.