Expertise as Capital - Experienced and Estimated by Doctoral Students

Abstract

There is a great and constantly renewed expectation of doctoral education, the highest level of specialist training, and of doctors globally. The Finnish education and university field is also re-positioned to create greater opportunities for continuous and sustainable learning. The goal for a long time has been that doctoral education should increasingly produce a more sophisticated teams of experts with expert knowledge and skills that meet the demands of digital and global, as well as forward-looking innovative visions. On the other hand, at the same time, doctors face uncertainty about the nature of their expertise and even the challenges of employment in their working life. However, the fields of expertise of the experts are becoming more diverse and slowly integrating but are still partly unstructured.

The systematic and rapid changes that are hard to predict are reflected in both universities and other expert working life contexts and fields. In the shadows of media-driven megatrends, there is an everyday level of dialogue where individuals are constantly seeking the best possible balance and fluency. In public discussions, the individual and the individual's experience of building expertise in the context of doctoral studies, as well as the possibilities to utilize expertise, often fall to the margin. Attempting to create understanding of the systemic process between different components and participants is important.

Expertise is multidimensional and possessively developing, and comprehensive meta-levelling of expertise is one of the essential goals of doctoral studies. Expertise basically requires a high level of training, but it is only the starting point of the process. Changes and new requirements will be reflected in the expertise and its constant repetition, while individual foresight should be made from the perspective of our own expertise (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2012). In doctoral studies, individual expertise development processes are launched, while doctoral students are guided by the practices of the academic community, their own individual life situations and, on the other hand, a changing society and working life. Expertise increasingly emphasizes both individual and communal, even networked perspectives. Continuous learning, the renewal of working life and the value of expertise are things that occur in the analyses of changing working life - and the same is the core of doctoral expertise, regardless of the field. Doctoral studies and processes of expertise are at the crossroads of many changes and pressures, providing many interesting aspects of review.

The paper is based on qualitative research analysis and the core interest are: what kind of expertise in doctoral studies is built up according to the doctoral students themselves, whether can expertise be defined and estimated as useful capital in different fields. The research material consists of a narrative theme interviews of nine female doctoral students or a fresh doctorate with family. The investigated were selected discretionary, they are the same persons whose lifespans I did study seven years earlier in my dissertation.