This chapter elaborates the range of situational, social and personal contributions to the development of occupational expertise arising through everyday work experiences, that is, how the activities and interactions comprising individuals’ lived experience of work can contribute to the formation of occupational competence and situational expertise. These considerations include the initial learning of occupational capacities and how those capacities are sustained and extended across working lives, as occupational and situational requirements change. Whilst occupational competence comprises the canonical knowledge required to practise an occupation, occupational expertise includes the capacities required for effective performance in specific circumstances where occupations are enacted. It embraces responding to routine and non-routine work tasks at both the canonical (occupational) and situational levels, as the goals for occupational practice are, by degree, situationally shaped; as is their learning. Although essential for both the initial and ongoing development of individuals’ occupational capacities, workplace contributions to that development are not always fully understood, acknowledged or utilized. The discourse of “schooled societies” tends to privilege experiences in educational institutions, teaching and teacherly contributions and through didactic practices over those afforded in settings where occupations are practised, which are characterized in negative terminology (e.g., informal, non-formal). In advancing its case, the chapter makes two interrelated contributions: (a) the delineation of three distinct domains of occupational knowledge to elaborate occupational expertise, and (b) an elaboration of how experiences in workplaces are generative of that expertise.
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