Why Promoting the Best Technician or Pilot to Instructor Often Fails, and Five Skills That Close the Gap

Debbie Curl-Nagy of TiER1 Performance, writing as a guest author for Halldale, builds on her WATS 2026 cabin crew stream presentation about turning subject matter experts into high-performing instructors. Her central point is that organisations often promote their top performers into instructor roles on the assumption that expertise will transfer, even though technical knowledge and instructional capability are fundamentally different skill sets. That mismatch, she argues, creates knowledge-transfer gaps that can affect safety and performance. She proposes five core instructor competencies: breaking automated skills into sequenced steps, making decision-making visible by narrating cues and reasoning, choosing and timing realistic scenarios so learning transfers to operations, asking questions instead of simply telling, and giving targeted feedback on what went well, what was missed and how to improve. For selection and development she suggests broadening criteria to include communication and adaptability, concentrating on three or four core skills rather than everything at once, and observing instructors with structured coaching, which she calls resource-intensive but the source of the biggest gains. The piece contains no survey data or figures and closes with a promotion for the EATS summit.