Career-developed expertise is an economic asset. Employment is one market for it, not the only one.

Experts rarely lose knowledge. They lose the ability to see it.

Years of experience turn good judgment into instinct. Decisions happen without conscious thought. Patterns become automatic. The expertise that creates the greatest results is often the hardest to explain — and the hardest to describe to anyone outside the organization where it was built.

That is the work Shannon studies.

Using instructional design and industrial-organizational psychology, she investigates the hidden layers of expertise that people use every day but rarely describe. She examines how experts think, decide, solve problems, and adapt to changing situations. Then she turns those invisible processes into practical systems that others can learn, apply, and repeat.

Her work helps experienced professionals take expertise built inside a career and turn it into products, services, or systems that create income outside their jobs. Not reinvention — translation. The existing expertise is the raw material.

The progression is Make It Visible, Make It Useful, Make It Work: what do I know, what could it become, who values it, and what will someone pay for. The strongest evidence that expertise has traveled beyond its original context is a transaction with a buyer outside your employer.

Shannon holds a Master of Science in Instructional Design and Technology, a Master of Science in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, and the Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD) credential.

She writes the Untrap Your Expertise publication, where she documents how to see, translate, and test career-developed expertise — building options before you need them.