Preface

What makes someone exceptionally good at what they do? Having attempted to answer the previous question, how do you conduct an international study to validate your description of expert behavior and later share your results with the world, hoping it becomes an aspirational benchmark of professional excellence?

Welcome to the essential mission of the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance, and Instruction. For over 46 years, several generations of passionate pro bono researchers and practitioners have pondered, discussed, analyzed, researched, written, and promoted professional competencies in the learning field.

The book you are holding is a masterpiece, like a pinecone of a sequoia tree. A single pinecone of these millennial trees contains an average of two hundred seeds carrying the DNA of the oldest-known living trees on the planet, roughly 3,000 years old. Similarly, in less than 160 pages, this book contains the historical legacy of an organization that has studied the competencies of instructors for 35 years, a considerable length of time when you factor in the impact of technology on human behavior. Consider that the first edition of instructor competencies was published in 1988, 1 year before Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) while working at the European Organization of Research (CERN).