Subject Matter Expert or in short SME is to describe one’s capabilities to be skillful in the role they are in. A lot of us can claimed to be an expert in our personal lives. Whether you are a great cook that whipped out a mean chocolate soufflé, a wonderful counsellor in break ups who soothes broken hearts or a fashion prodigy who always dressed immaculately among your friends. Are you able to claim that you are an expert in what you do? A few ways below to inspire you to do more:

1. Read Up
That goes without saying that you should read up on your role. Try different outlets to source for your readings. The internet might be a good start but don’t forget to hit the bookstores and libraries.

2. Mingle
Talk to people closest to you in your role. Your peers. Compare with what they are doing and see how differently they execute a task. Share tips and gather ideas to improve creatively.

3. Find out
Everyone’s role lead to a process, find out what the process entails. For example, if you are in sales, find out more about order processing. If you are in order processing, find out more about logistics and shipping.

4. Meet up
Meet people up externally with the same job scope as yourself. Learn from them and their companies what they do differently from yours. You can find social groups like this on Meet Up groups here. There cater to almost every countries.

5. Study 
If you don’t want to commit yourself in a degree or masters that will take years and a lot of money to complete, try going for seminars. It can be a seminar that combines with retreat or a one day talk. Alternatively, there are free online courses that help to improve yourself further. Online courses that are from allow you to pace yourself and it’s free so you don’t have to feel guilty if you don’t complete it.

These are 5 basic steps to help you to enhance your skills and help you to better yourself in your career. When your superior talks to you next in discussion about your appraisal, you can use these 5 points to illustrate that you are serious in your job and have taken these actions to follow through.

Next, I want to take some time to give you a few tools to help you get started in improving yourself:

1. Coursera, Edx, OpenCulture, Stanford
Free online courses that you can make full use of. These are not fly-by-night universities, they include the most prestigious ones like MIT, Yale, Stanford etc. The courses usually comes with video tutorials downloadable and articles that you will need to read up on. There are short quizzes at the end of each session and sometimes, the lecturer might ask a project to be completed at the end of the course and submit to him for grading.

What do you get out of it: An online certificate that you can add-on to your CV.

Cost: Free!

Duration: Depending on difficulty, 2-3 hours each week for 4 to 10 weeks of your time

2. Read up regularly on related websites
We are talking about NY Times, Wallstreet Journal even recruiting websites like JobStreet sometimes have very good articles that are useful. And of course, always follow me at MiddleMe.net too!

What do you get out of it: Views from a different angle, advice from experienced people

Cost: Free!

Duration: The time in between your journey from work to home and home to work everyday.

3. Talk to an expert
There is no harm done talking to someone who has been through what you are going through now. It depends on your need but usually it cost very little or free even. You can engaged professional freelancers like in Fiverr to offer you career advice for a USD$5 or you can approach career consultants like myself with your issue through their websites and usually its free. Sometimes, we just need a listening ear to our problems and someone to guide us through the tunnel.

Cost: Free or little cost

Duration: 15mins to draft an email to me asking for help

Are these tips useful? If you have more to add, please feel free to comment below. Have an amazing day ahead!