This chapter revisits the Expert Transition Cycle presented in Chapter 3 from the perspective of how identity changes. Five stages of the Expert Transition Cycle operate during transition. Intention orients and clarifies choices and provides drive. Inquiry holds open the transition process with criteria for choice and discrimination based upon intention. Exploration actively investigates the familiar and the new elements of identity, roles, social situations, work opportunities, beliefs, and performance. Commitment narrows and targets the choices made regarding those elements. Integration modifies and adapts the identity to include new elements, knowledge, experience, and beliefs. Each stage of the Expert Transition Cycle is reviewed in light of the operation of the transition experiences, such as cognitive flexibility and purpose. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This concluding chapter revisits some of the main themes of the book. Transition expertise is discussed through the lenses of cognitive adaptability, personal intelligences, contextual intelligence, and motivation. Career transitions are discussed through the themes of self concept evolution and identity change. The methodological characteristics of the study are evaluated, including its limitations. The questions of control group, nontransitions, and failed transitions are addressed. Finally, avenues of future research are proposed, including self-efficacity and self-control, resiliency, and wisdom. The discussion is informed by the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter presents a brief theoretical overview of intelligence, cognition, and expertise and their theoretical basis for use in the subsequent chapters. It introduces the main models of intelligence including trait and factorial models, the triarchic mind, and multiple intelligence theories. It then reviews the approach of cognitive psychology based upon early computer modelling of human cognition, schemas and frames, production systems, and episodic and semantic memory. Finally, it reviews expert systems, expert knowledge acquisition and retrieval, practice, transfer of skill, flexibility of knowledge retrieval, and how all of these factors influence the ability of an individual to make transitions in their careers.

Most intelligence models include an array of processes and mechanisms that enable experts to generalize their knowledge and processes during career transitions and produce flexibility in cognitive structures that enable individuals to overcome limitations in applying expert knowledge and processes across domains and functional areas. These processes have been described variously as insightful thinking, induction, eduction, elaborating and mapping, novelty and metaphorical capacity, inductive inference, divergent production abilities, analogy, flexibility of use, and closure. They are discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter presents an overview of the book and positions it in the context of the development of expertise and the pursuit of excellence. It presents the historical context of the development of expertise and the theoretical context of the study of expertise.

This chapter draws upon and integrates aspects of two well-researched hybrid models of intelligence: practical intelligence and social intelligence. Contextual intelligence addresses how individuals interact with their environment. Contextual intelligence in transitions operates in three main categories: (1) identifying environmental resources such as physical resources, enabling environments, education and training, or team resources; (2) identifying knowledge experts such as peers and mentors or external knowledge experts and stakeholders, who provide expert domain knowledge in diverse fields; and (3) understanding of the cultural and social milieu into which one is moving, whether this be understanding the cultural climate, accessing culturally embedded knowledge, using the right language, or ultimately navigating the politics of the new arena. Retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) are used to investigate how contextual intelligence is used to successfully and repeatedly transition to higher positions within their field.

This chapter reviews the major theories of career transitions and the stages individuals progress through in their career. It then presents the Expert Transition Stages model, which tracks individuals through their career progression. It explains the six major career stages: (1) Studentship, (2) Performer, (3) Manager/coach, (4) Head of department, (5) Divisional lead, and (6) Chief. It focuses in particular on the five transitions between these stages and explains the nature of these transitions.

Self concept is an evolving sense of self that encompasses work, expression of potential, and purpose for being. Self concept is more encompassing than identity, and includes motivations, beliefs such as self-efficacy, attributions and construals, mental models of self, and social roles. Self concept grows and evolves through life and transitions, but only seldom does the whole self concept come up for review and revision. Narrative construction provided an approach to examining how the stories individuals tell about themselves shape and help create their evolving self concept. The evolution of self concept is reviewed in light of the operation of the transition experiences – cognitive flexibility, generative intelligence, personal intelligences, motivation, and purpose through the use of retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.