Available
June 11
2024
Pre-Order Now
Available where books are sold
Available
June 11
2024
“If you’re worried about your skills becoming obsolete, this book may be your saving grace. Matt Beane has spent his career studying how to gain and maintain expertise as technology evolves, and his analysis is both engrossing and edifying.”
“There has never been a more important time for this book— nor anyone more qualified to explain what it all means than Matt Beane. The Skill Code teaches urgent lessons.”
From one of the world’s top researchers on work and technology comes an insightful and surprising guide to protecting your skill in a world filling with AI and robots.
Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it?
Whatever your job – plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon – decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learning—school and books—gave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert.
Today, this essential bond is under threat. In our grail-like quest to optimize productivity with intelligent technologies like AI and robots, we are separating junior workers from experts in workplaces around the world. It’s a looming multi-trillion-dollar problem that few are addressing, until now.
In The Skill Code, researcher and technologist Matt Beane reveals the hidden code that underwrites every successful expert-novice relationship. Beane has spent the last decade examining this unique bond in a variety of settings, from warehouses to surgical suites. He’s found that just as the four amino acids are the building blocks of DNA, the three C’s—challenge, complexity, and connection—are the basic components of how we develop our most valuable skills.
Whether you’re an expert or a novice, this book will show you how to build skill more effectively – and how to make intelligent technologies part of the solution, not the problem. The Skill Code is an insightful must-read, with significant implications for how we will work and build skill in the twenty-first century—a guide to help you not only survive but thrive.
Pre-Order Now
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“Beane shows us the true human-centered approach to AI advancements and how we must act now to achieve the next generation of human skills coupled with the productivity gains from AI.”
“If you’re worried about your skills becoming obsolete, this book may be your saving grace. Matt Beane has spent his career studying how to gain and maintain expertise as technology evolves, and his analysis is both engrossing and edifying.”
“Beane delivers an essential, meticulously researched road map for combining intelligent technologies with the way humans have built skill for thousands of years to reach our brightest possible future.”
“With riveting stories, The Skill Code offers a timeless recipe for skill development and thriving at work in the age of AI.”
“Matt’s decades-long curiosity about human work positions him perfectly to offer such a thoughtful and well-researched guide to skill development in this age of generative AI.”
“There has never been a more important time for this book— nor anyone more qualified to explain what it all means than Matt Beane. The Skill Code teaches urgent lessons.”
“With academic rigor and actionable insights, Matt’s watershed book offers a new approach to skill development that aligns the age-old realities of expert-novice collaboration with the innovative potential of intelligent tools.”
“In this vital book, Beane focuses us on an immediate, hidden concern: that today’s powerful technologies give people fewer opportunities to learn as they try to master a difficult craft.”
“The Skill Code is a compelling reminder of the timeless importance of human guidance in an increasingly automated world.”
“Matt Beane’s The Skill Code is a rollicking read, it’s magnificently researched, and, above all, a relentlessly useful and timely playbook.”
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Wild World of Work
Investigating the wild work of work, learning, and intelligent technologies – through research and responsible thinking.