Why experts matter

In a world where ‘expertise’ is often derided or suspected, we believe in the value of being experts in our field. For us, expertise is all about having specialist skills and knowledge – it’s the combination of those two things that means we can bring added value to the varied projects we work on, across multiple sectors.

In his book Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery, Professor Roger Kneebone talks about the importance of expertise. In an interview about the book, he said: “You can’t become expert unless you take a long time. You need time for things to go wrong and learn to put them right. You have to have been in difficult situations, and learn from that experience. People are experts because they have been at it 30 years. And that is hard for people to appreciate because part of being an expert and doing it for so long is to make it look effortless. So people then think ‘oh, anyone can do that.’ It’s very easy to underestimate it.”

Professor Kneebone is Director for the Centre for Performance Science and the Imperial Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science at Imperial University, and believes that people are always on a path towards expertise – no matter what their discipline or area of specialism – and that’s what makes expertise so interesting. “Nobody will ever be as good as they could possibly become,” he says. “That’s one of the exciting things about it because you can always keep getting better.”

Design and development expertise at Cascade

Roger Kneebone’s assessment of expertise is pretty much in line with our own. We have many years’ experience of applying our academic engineering skills to important and practical projects. That experience has allowed us to develop expertise in particular fields – the design and certification of complex components within a wider project – and has led to us becoming trusted partners for a number of leading OEMs in the UK and beyond.

Our expertise is brought in by these companies to help them achieve the best results – whether that’s for designing completely new and innovative parts of an aerospace or marine project, or for re-analysing an existing design because of a change in use or a new manufacturer taking over. By supporting in-house teams with our own brand of expertise, we bring speed, accuracy, cost-savings and performance enhancements to complex projects.

To find out more about how we can bring our specialist expertise to your business, contact us today.