How to explain that you know how to do something but can't explain it?

Post date: 2021-04-17 07:53:40

This could be any skill and not just my immediate example. I had a job interview and the data analysis person asked me about my data cleaning and merging several sources together for analysis techniques. I had no clear answer. Literally, my technique is to look at the data and their sources and go to work based on what needs to be done. I like to think that I'm good at it.

I really, really like to think that I'm really, really good at merging, cleaning, and making large data sources useable. Hold the Dunning Kruger Effect comments, but expertise theory holds that experts often cannot explain how they do things. I used to do market research across countries and pulled data from various sources that never matched or made sense on their own. Then I put it all together to tell a great story, but I can't really tell you how I did/do it.

Of course, after the fact, of course, I have been able to think about a really impressive and regularly occurring task that I had to perform monthly on a large data set, but too late.

I hope I said it better than this, but how do you explain that "I just do it. I don't really know how".
This question could theoretically be applied to any skill or topic. It's not necessarily about job interviews, but job interviews might be a special high-stakes example.

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