Based on consistent findings that tacit knowledge contributes to our understanding performance in a variety of domains, we discussed a number of potential ways to promote the acquisition and use of tacit knowledge. Numerous insights and products are obtained through the process of studying tacit knowledge. The categories of tacit knowledge within a domain, for example, offer insight into the experiences that provide important developmental opportunities. The products, such as the stories and the inventory questions, can be used to share the tacit knowledge with other practitioners. The tacit-knowledge research also suggests that training activities, such as case studies and simulations, may be valuable ways to impart experience-based, tacit knowledge and to provide opportunities to acquire new practical knowledge. Although these approaches may encourage the acquisition and use of tacit knowledge, in rapidly changing, complex environments, it may be more effective in the long run to identify and develop ways to help individuals to learn better from their everyday experiences.

Up to this point, our research efforts have been targeted primarily at understanding and measuring practical cognition. For the present and foreseeable future, we believe that the most viable approach to increasing the variance accounted for in real-world criteria such as job performance is to supplement existing cognition and aptitude tests with selection of additional measures based on new constructs such as practical cognition. Although we are excited by the promise of a new generation of measures of practical cognition, we are the first to admit that existing evidence for the new measures does not yet match that available for traditional cognitive-academic skill tests. However, a substantial amount of evidence indicates that performance on measures of practical cognition is related to a wide variety of criterion measures of real-world performance, but relatively unrelated to traditional measures of academic cognition. Consequently, using both kinds of measures explains more variance in performance than relying on either kind alone. Cognition is not only academic, but practical.