Relationship of adaptive expertise of health professions educators with age, experience, academic rank, and their work performance during an altered academic environment

Abstract Background Health professionals and health professions educators (HPEs) worldwide had to confront with the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted standard practice and forced HPEs to come up with creative, alternative modes for training and education. The ability of people to work successfully and efficiently in non-standard situations can be called adaptive expertise in which people quickly overcome changes in work requirements using their expert knowledge in novel ways. The objectives of the study were to investigate how the adaptive expertise of a group of HPEs influenced perceived work performance in a non-standard situation and to see whether there were any relationships between adaptive expertise and academic ranking and work experience of HPEs. Methods A descriptive, cross-sectional, single-site study was conducted using a self-reported study tool about adaptive expertise developed by Carbonell et al. (2016) and three questions about work performance, amount of work done and teaching quality. The sample consisted of HPEs from the University of Twente, Netherlands. Results Among 123 eligible participants, 40 individuals completed the survey. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity indicated the adequacy of the sample size (KMO= 0.633, P<0.0001). Participants were lecturers, senior lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors and full professors. The Cronbach alpha value was 0.72, which measures the internal reliability of the tool. The average adaptive expertise score of the sample was 4.18±0.57 on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high). Professors showed higher adaptive expertise scores than the other ranks. Statistically significant correlations were found between scores of adaptive expertise and perceived work performance (ρ = 0.56, p < 0.001) and academic ranking (ρ = 0.35, p < 0.01). However, the adaptive expertise score was not associated with work experience or HPEs' age. Conclusions Our finding of a lack of relationships between self-reported level of adaptive expertise and experience and age but significant relationships with work performance and academic ranking of HPEs suggests that adaptive expertise is not auto-generated or acquired with seniority and experience automatically but is a skill that should be developed deliberately.