I wonder how many hours I’ve spent being a cultural resource management archaeologist. It’s hard to calculate because, even though I’ve been doing CRM since 2004, I haven’t always been employed full-time as a CRMer. In fact, based on the longest stints I’ve had with CRM companies, I think it’s only added up to 7 years of full-time employment for 50 weeks each year. I’ve been a full-time graduate student, shovelbumming, or unemployed for the rest of that time. (Those numbers seem pretty sad—three years of unstable employment—but I had over 20 different jobs before I started making CRM my full-time career. I don’t push shopping carts or make pizzas anymore, thank god.)
Those 7 years of full-time CRM employment compose at least 14,000 hours of work (40 hr. work weeks x 50 weeks each year=2,000 x 7 years=14,000). That’s a long time. It represents 20 percent of my life so far. I only plan on adding to those hours.
I bring all of this up because, recently, I was thinking about expertise-building and wondering: How do people become experts on CRM archaeology? I’ve noticed that many of the best CRM supervisors I’ve ever worked for were not the people with the most years of CRM experience. In fact, many of the old timers were horrible supervisors because they really didn’t care about what they were doing anymore.
Typically, the best CRMers were only a few years older than me (or, sometimes, younger) and were skilled in getting us interested in the projects we were doing. They were always emphasizing the value of what we were doing, even when the project was pretty much a bust, and kept our spirits high by imagining the cool artifact/site we might find. These were usually the folks that were more interested in doing a good job and exploring more than they were simply getting some CRM box checked for a client somewhere. They cared about archaeology. They were doing this job because they wanted to know more about the world.
It got me thinking: If years of experience are not a good predictor of expertise, how does one become an expert?
Archaeology and the 10,000-Hour Rule
Obviously, we have to do CRM archaeology in order to gain expertise in the field. But, how many years do we have to work before we can be considered experts?
Job postings for PIs—the closest thing to the description of a CRM expert that I could think of—usually ask for a graduate degree and 5 to 10 years of supervisory experience. The time it takes to finish a graduate degree varies, but there seems to be a consensus that it takes between 10,000 and 20,000 hours of supervisory CRM experience to be considered for a PI position.
This is significant because it falls in line with recent discussions on how many hours of concentrated effort are required before a practitioner can be considered an expert. In the article “The Making of an Expert” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007), authors K. Anders Ericsson, Michael Prietula and Edward Cokely state that it takes at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and coaching for somebody to master a talent or skill. Ericsson et al. explain that you can’t just do something for 10,000+ hours and expect to master it. If you want to become a master, you have to do three main things:
1) Practice Deliberately. Expertise requires hours of practice with full concentration. You have to put in, “…considerable, specific, and sustained efforts…” to go from stranger to expert. For CRMers, this means you need to be focusing on work-related tasks with your full attention and deliberately work to improve your skills if you want to move forward in the field. Also, you need to push yourself. You have to learn things you aren’t comfortable or familiar with so that you have to try hard and push.
It is unlikely that you can put in 10-straight hours of concerted effort every day, but you should try to practice for at least 4 to 5 hours a day if you want to realize significant gain.
2) Take your time. Becoming really, really good at your job will take time. Don’t expect to be an expert on anything for at least 10,000 hours. If CRM is really new to you, it might take even longer than that. The authors point out that it takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years of steady practice to reach the highest levels. Olympians usually start at a very early age and continue concerted practice for over a decade before they get a shot at the games.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take anything like this to get good at archaeology but it does take multiple years unless you started working at sites when you were very young (like my kids who both worked at their first site before they were 5-years-old and could identify Hohokam ceramics from their strollers).
3) Find a good mentor. This should go without saying but nobody learns without a good teacher. You need feedback if you are ever going to improve. Ericsson et al. suggest taking advantage of a range of different teachers throughout your career because your needs will change as you develop. Early on, you need encouragement. You need critiques and constructive criticism as you develop.
I’ve found it both easy and hard to find good mentors. It’s hard to find good CRM PIs that are willing to share the tricks of the trade with up-and-coming young archaeos, but I’ve found it pretty easy to find good mentors in academia. Perhaps that’s because professors are paid to teach and mentor whereas PIs are paid to bring in contracts and maintain a company’s competitive edge.
Whatever your career level, it pays to find people who have the job you’d like to have and are willing to tell you how they did it. This is one of the easiest ways to improve your skills and climb the ladder.
Use the Dan Plan and Log your 10,000 Hours
A couple months ago, I listened to a conversation with Dan McLaughlin on the New Man Podcast. In his interview, McLaughlin explained how he created a plan to become a professional golfer by putting in 10,000 hours of concerted effort and practice. This is at the heart of The Dan Plan—to go from novice to PGA tour player in 10,000 hours or less. He quit his job and started working on this dream in 2010. He has about 4,100 hours left to go.
Go to the website and see Dan’s progress.
Whether or not Dan succeeds in his dream to become a PGA pro, the idea that you need to put in thousands of hours of concentration, effort, and practice in order to develop expertise in a given activity is very sound. Experts are not born, they are made through sweat and tears. Archaeology is no different.
I want to be very clear: There is a big difference between working in CRM archaeology for 25 years (50,000 hours) and being so proficient in CRM that others would consider you an expert. I’ve known a lot of very knowledgeable archaeologists that had only been doing the job for a few years. I’ve also met folks I’d call experts that had 8 or 10 years of experience. Unfortunately, I’ve also worked for people that had been doing CRM archaeology for over 20 years and still made horrible, easily avoidable mistakes that cost time and money.
In archaeology, years of “experience” does not demonstrate expertise. Years of concentration, practice, evaluation, and experience does result in a CRM archaeology expert.
What do you think? Is there a such thing as being a CRM archaeology expert? If so, how do you evaluate expertise?
Please, write a comment below or send me an email.
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