Instructional Design
Instructional design taught me to ask: What does someone need to know or do to perform well?
It taught me to break complex work apart, find the missing steps, and make knowledge easier for someone else to use.
About Shannon D. Smith
I have always been interested in what people know that they cannot easily explain.
The longer someone does a job well, the more of that work becomes automatic.
- They see things faster.
- They ask different questions.
- They know when the usual answer will not work.
- And when you ask them how they knew what to do, you often hear: “It depends.”
That answer fascinates me. Because the useful part is usually hiding inside what comes next.
The question behind my work
What makes an experienced person good at what they do?
It is not only what they know.
Experience changes what they notice. It changes the questions they ask. It changes which details matter.
It changes the mistakes they see coming. It changes what they do when there is no obvious answer.
That hidden layer of judgment is where I spend most of my time.
Two fields shaped how I see expertise.
Industrial-Organizational Psychology
I-O psychology taught me to look at the person inside the larger system.
How do people make decisions? What affects performance? How do experience, motivation, work conditions, and behavior shape results?
Together, those two fields gave me a different way to look at expertise.
I do not start with: What could you create?
I start with: What has your experience actually taught you?
How I got here
I have spent much of my career between experts and the people who need to learn from them.
As an instructional designer and trainer, I have worked with people who knew their subjects deeply.
My job was often to help turn that knowledge into something another person could understand and use.
Experts could show me the finished process. They could tell me the official steps. But the real expertise often appeared somewhere else.
It showed up when I asked why they made one choice instead of another. When they told me about the exception. When they caught a problem before anyone else saw it. When they said, “I can usually tell.”
That is when the deeper work began.
Over time, I realized this problem was bigger than training. Experienced professionals everywhere have knowledge they use every day but have never had a reason to examine closely.
Their résumé cannot show it. A list of skills cannot capture it. And asking, “What should I sell?” skips right over it.
Untrap Your Expertise grew from that gap.
Today, I help experienced professionals examine what their careers have taught them.
Not every strength needs to become a product. Not every skill needs to become a business.
And being good at something does not automatically mean you should build around it.
I help people look at the evidence. What have you done? What judgment sits beneath those results? What patterns keep showing up? What kind of work gives you energy? Where might that expertise create value for someone else? And what deserves your time next?
The goal is not to manufacture a new expert identity. The goal is to see the expertise that is already there more clearly.
Shannon D. Smith, CPTD
M.S. Instructional Design & Technology
M.S. Industrial-Organizational Psychology
Staff development trainer, instructional designer, facilitator, writer, and founder of Untrap Your Expertise.
Think your career has taught you something worth examining?
You do not have to know exactly what it is yet. That is where the work starts.