Working With Highly Technical Subject Matter Experts

You’re sitting across from someone who knows their subject with a depth that borders on the intimidating, and within ten minutes they’ve used seventeen acronyms, drawn a diagram that covers the entire whiteboard, and looked at you with the quiet, patient expression of someone who has accepted that you probably won’t keep up. Working with highly technical subject matter experts is one of the most rewarding, and one of the most quietly humbling, parts of this job.

The challenges are real. Technical SMEs have usually spent years, sometimes decades, developing expertise that has become so internalised it’s almost invisible to them; what seems obvious to a senior engineer or a specialist clinician may represent months of conceptual groundwork for a complete newcomer. This is the curse of knowledge at its most pronounced, and it creates problems when we try to translate that expertise into a training intervention that needs to work for someone on day three of a new role. There is also, often, a gap in priorities. The SME’s job is not training design; they have systems to maintain, projects to deliver, and meetings to attend that were probably more important than this one. Respect that.

The benefits, though, are considerable. A technically expert SME is an asset that no amount of desktop research can replace. They hold the tacit knowledge: the workarounds, the exceptions, the things that the manual doesn’t mention because whoever wrote the manual assumed you already knew them. They can tell you what actually goes wrong in practice, and why, and what a competent performer does that a struggling one doesn’t. If you can build a productive working relationship, you’ve gained access to the kind of performance intelligence that makes the difference between training that ticks boxes and training that changes how people work.

Three practices that help unlock that value:

Anchor every conversation in performance, not content

Before you discuss what someone needs to know, establish what they need to be able to do, and in what context, and with what frequency. Technical experts find it much easier to be useful when the question is “what does someone have to get right for this process to work?” than when it is “what should we cover about this topic?” Performance framing gives the SME a problem to solve, which is generally something they are very good at.

Use their time in short, focused bursts

A ninety-minute knowledge transfer session with a senior technical expert often produces less usable content than three focused thirty-minute conversations, each built around a specific task or scenario. Prepare those conversations thoroughly: bring worked examples, draft scenarios, prototype materials. Show them what you’re building. Concrete artefacts generate concrete feedback far more reliably than open-ended discussion.

Make the implicit explicit through deliberate questioning

When an SME says something is straightforward, that is your cue to slow down and ask more questions. “Walk me through what you do when it doesn’t go to plan” and “what would a novice most likely get wrong here?” are two of the most productive questions in a content-gathering toolkit. The expertise you most need is rarely the expertise someone volunteers first.

Technical SMEs are not obstacles to good design; they are the closest thing we have to a direct line to the performance context we’re trying to support. The investment in building that relationship well pays dividends long after a single programme concludes.