There is a common situation when a person has participated in training or finished a course, but he can’t solve any related problem afterward. Why does it happen? Let us check how people learn, understand, and use their knowledge in real life.

Chain Of Knowledge

The chain of knowledge consists of three steps — learning, understanding, and usage.

Learning is the first step; its primary purpose is only to acquire knowledge without deep understanding. At this moment, a person has to answer the question of what he needs to know.

Understanding is the following step when a person has to process the data, build a model inside his head, and discover its structure. Here the main point is to understand why this model works.

Usage is the final step in the chain, and this is the practice stage. A person has to gain experience, see all the internal and external processes, and understand how they work in real life.

The steps themselves are relatively easy to understand and work with. The hard parts are transitions between them when a person has to make an effort to move along the knowledge chain.

Learn And Understand

The crucial ability required to move from learning to understating is building logical chains related to the knowledge area. For example, if you are learning to cook and know that the same product may taste differently, you can understand why the taste is changing. It may happen because of heat treatment, additional spices, etc.

The logical chain is needed to explain cause and effect. The cause represents some information a person already knows from the learning step (what has happened). The effect is the consequence that explains the connection between cause and effect (why it happens).

After a person has built several such logical chains, he gets confidence in the related knowledge area. So, a person can analyze the current situation to find issues or predict consequences in the future. It is one of the prerequisites needed to gain the experience.

Understand And Use

Moving from understanding to usage is critical when a person has already acquired the minimum required knowledge to try and do something by himself. So, a person has to apply this knowledge to some actual cases.

This transition always involved real-life work and real examples. At this stage, a person has to use logical chains and cause-effect connections to figure out how things work and how to improve them. It is the conversion of theoretical knowledge into practical experience.

Usage as a final step connects all “what“, “why“ and “how“ questions, and a person has to have a full and clear understanding of both theoretical and practical parts to succeed.

To acquire more knowledge and gain more experience, a person may need to repeat this cycle several times and add new tasks or activities with each iteration. It is recommended and perhaps the only way how a person can become an expert. Follow this way, remember the importance of three steps of the knowledge chain, and you will succeed and become an expert in your knowledge area!