The 4 Stages Of Skill Acquisition

The 4 Stages Of Skill Acquisition

When you practically acquire a new skill, whether it is boxing, cycling, intelligence,sports, music, painting, chess, or something completely different from what you have, some experts hypothesis that we go through series of standardized stages over a given period. From experience, I totally agree with that. These stages honestly tends to reflect two practical things:

 1) our increasing desirous sophistication relative to the skill and 2) our metacognitive awareness of that sophistication, or our  vertical understanding of our uprightness. The Conscious Competence model enable us to give more detailed explanation on the  exemplary process by which we move through these stages to acquire a skill and an awareness of our level of acquisition2.

Furthermore, comprehensive studies has proven that unconscious incompetence is the first stage in the model. In this stage, we don’t know much about the skill, and we don’t know how much we don’t know.more theoretically, we have only slight technical understanding of what mastery of the skill might entail—and we will eventually find out that understanding is inadequate. We are likely unconsciously incompetent in any arena where we have no experience whatsoever.

Conscious incompetence comes next. In this stage, we have learned enough about the skill to realize how little we know. Our  sophistication has increased positively, however,this has also added some credit to our awareness of what it would take to get to a level of ideal/practical sophistication. This stage can be difficult  to enter, because we realize both how little we knew in the previous stage and how much work it will take to progress to further stages.

Well, Conscious competence is the stage where we find ourselves able to perform the skill increasingly well, but it takes lots of concentration and hard work to do so. We have a better appreciation for what it would take to become an expert, and while our performance relative to the skill continues to improve, we are also aware of the need to work at the skill as well as the fact that we are doing things differently from the way we used to do them.

Also,unconscious competence is the stage where our ability to perform the skill has become almost second nature. We improve still further at our execution of the skill and have to use less conscious effort to do so.

Each participant or individual can simply identify multiple domains in which we are in each of these stages. Being in the conscious stages can be a bit uncomfortable. However, a deep insight can offer that also provides an opportunity for us to improve our metacognition about learning different skills, and to broaden our horizons in general.

Comprehensive knowledge of where we are in the stages of skill acquisition can help us all to become comfortable with the discomfort everyone must feel in order to improve3.

READ THIS: Why Skills and Skill Acquisition is an Essential Tool For Youth Empowerment