In deze tweede aflevering van De Flexpert Podcast spreekt Lonneke Frie met flexpert Anouschka Laheij. Anouschka heeft in haar werkende leven altijd meerdere rollen gecombineerd, met nu een unieke dubbelrol: ze werkt als gespreksleider en dagvoorzitter met (grote) groepen en werkt daarnaast als psycholoog-coach één op één met mensen. In beide rollen helpt ze mensen zichzelf en elkaar beter te begrijpen. Lonneke en Anouschka praten over het vinden van werk dat past bij wie je bent en wilt zijn als individu. Ze hebben het over de rol die anderen kunnen spelen in deze zoektocht, over hoe het is om geconfronteerd te worden met je angsten als je weer iets nieuws voor jezelf gaat ontwikkelen, en het maken van keuzes in je loopbaan. Anouschka licht toe hoe ze zichzelf geregeld heeft vernieuwd gedurende haar loopbaan. Daarom is ze volgens Lonneke een echte flexpert.
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In this first English-spoken episode of The Flexpert Podcast, Lonneke Frie interviews her guest Rik Jacobs. They discuss Rik’s career in the light of the Flexpertise theory, to identify what makes Rik a true Flexpert. Rik started his career selling air conditioning and refrigeration units all across Europe. Now, he works as a consultant in 3D printing for the dental industry. Throughout his career, Rik has not been scared to switch jobs and to start positions in new fields. Even though oftentimes Rik started out having no knowledge of these new fields, he was still able to apply his expertise in connecting business critical experts and the market. Lonneke and Rik talk about creating innovation and how it can be important to have a vision for where the market should move towards in order to act accordingly. They also talk about the value of making yourself known, when you develop new expertise, in order to generate business opportunities and create career opportunities for yourself.
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This dissertation concerns the adaptive ability by which workers meet new expertise needs throughout their careers. We aimed to increase our understanding of this adaptive ability through a series of four studies building upon the concept of flexpertise (Van der Heijden, 1998, 2000). These studies were designed to advance theorizing, specifically in scholarly research on expertise and expert performance (Ericsson et al., 2006) and sustainable careers (Van der Heijden & De Vos, 2015), and to increase our understanding of how flexpertise may be fostered among workers across expertise domains and working contexts.In this introduction chapter, we outline the key theoretical concepts regarding the flexpertise phenomenon that we will use throughout this dissertation, a description of the knowledge gap in the scholarly literature, and our research focus. This is followed by a summary of this PhD project that outlines the overall research objective, the research questions and research methods that we deployed, as well as an overview of the four flexpertise studies conducted (see Table 1.1). The subsequent chapters include the four (submitted) scientific publications on this matter. We conclude by reflecting on the theoretical, methodological and practical value of our research, and on the limitations of our research approach. We finish with recommendations for future research, ethical considerations on the usage of the flexpertise concept in labor market debates, and a personal reflection on this PhD program.Before explaining the key concept of flexpertise and related core concepts, we first outline what we mean by new expertise needs. These needs shaped the background of the four studies conducted.
