Defining Aviation “Skills” to Ensure Effective, Safe, and Efficient Evaluations: A Qualitative Study

The present qualitative case study strives to define the term skill within aviation, drawing from the cognitive psychology, organizational psychology, and training literature as well as input from subject matter experts in the aviation industry. A review of the published literature revealed no consensus for defining what constitutes a skill. While some definitions follow a task-based approach, others emphasize more cognitively based representations. Moreover, a formal, commonly accepted definition of the term skill within the aviation domain is lacking. The researchers employed a qualitative case study methodology to extract true descriptions from the subject matter experts to bound and expand from the current literature while rooting the findings within the theoretical model of situation awareness. Findings from this study indicate the term skill encompasses multiple high-order thinking processes. While these processes can be defined differently depending on the field in which one applies the term skill, they are still rooted in three common themes: goal-oriented, efficiency, and high proficiency