If only it were so easy as making clever rhymes. We want to the training our team does to be sticky, not tricky. So much of that course/conference/bite-sized learning module has managed to stay safely tucked away in barely legible notes rather than being demonstrated in daily work tasks - how??? Do you think you should demand a refund?
I should say this strikes a particular chord with me. I have spent a lot of my adult life trying to get information from a whiteboard into the brains of others (and subsequently into their actions). It’s part of the beauty and the pain of being in any sort of training/learning/educating industry role. You carefully create a training session to essentially transfer a bit of knowledge or skill. There’s a lot of nodding and insightful conversation in the room. Everyone goes back to the office and…
We can do so much better. Let’s anchor the topic of training transfer in some evidence. In an excellent systematic review published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology (2024), “Making Soft Skills Stick: a systematic scoping review and integrated training transfer framework grounded in behavioural science” (Hamzah, Marcinko, Stephens & Weick, 2024), the authors helpfully break down what has strong evidence in the literature of making transfer stick. Another very useful review published in 2017 in the Journal of Applied Psychology titled “100 Years of Training and Development Research: What We Know and Where We Should Go” (Bell, Tannenbaum, Ford, Noe, & Kraiger, 2017) does something similar if you felt like leafing through a history-contextualised look at our failure to do training effectively for a century.
Perhaps for now, we can agree to the shared goals of
identifying causes for the cavernous gap between when training happens and when trainees are back in their desk chairs
how we build a sturdy bridge across that gap so all the wonderful learning doesn’t fall to an unpleasant end
What has this got to do with professional development?
There is sometimes a reference made in research on the topic of training transfer and learning transfer called the ‘transfer problem’. Potentially, frequent use of the phrase started back in a 1988 in a paper called ‘Transfer of Training: A review and directions for future research” by Baldwin and Ford. While we’ve come some distance, there remains a Bermuda Triangle of sorts into which the targeted behaviours input during the training session do not show up in the work environment. What’s going on?
There’s a great line in a lit review on soft skill training transfer by Botke, Jansen, Khapova, & Tims (2018) that reads - “Despite the large investments in and potential benefits of training, organisational decision makers are often unsure of the extent to which employees perform differently once they have returned to work, and they also fail to understand how to optimise this transfer,” (p.130). Ouch.
What does this look like in practice?
Let’s organise our thoughts and subsequent actions into some neat categories in the interest of writing something digestible. The extent to which trained behavior transfers to behaviors on-the-job has been generally agreed as dependent upon the factors of trainee characteristics, work environment, and the training design. Training design is far too large a topic for here so, we’ll focus on the sub-factors of trainee characteristics and work environment. Within trainee characteristics, we’ll consider ‘motivation’. Within work environment, we’ll consider ‘opportunity’.
(Botke et al., 2018)
To create an example for Practical discussion, let’s consider motivation in the pre-training space. We’ll put opportunity in the post-training space. Also, we’ll pretend it’s some soft skills training that’s going on at your hypothetical work in order to make this a little more concrete.
Example 1 - Motivation (pre-training)
Situation: You’re a manager and today you’ll lead the weekly team meeting. Next week, there is training on Interpersonal Skills: Managing Interactions with Others.
Task: To highlight the job relevance of this upcoming training for your team; to highlight your support for the transfer of the training
Actions: Using an example of your own role and how managing your interactions with others is a key component of positive outcomes, set the following questions to your team for them to discuss for 10 minutes in small groups. Question: In the recent past, can you think of an interaction you’ve had where any of the following happened? The interaction time didn’t fit the purpose (too long or too short); you weren’t able to express yourself with clarity; you found your interlocutor to be confusing; you came away from the interaction frustrated.
Bring that group back together after 10 minutes and ask for people to share. Listen, nod, say things like ‘good stuff’ and ‘thanks for sharing’ - and then highlight how next week’s training will provide them with tools when faced with similar situations in the future.
Finally, express how you’re looking forward to hearing about (and seeing) what they will learn and apply to their specific roles. Explain how after the training is complete, they’ll discuss their takeaways and how they have been applying them to their specific work. Something for everyone to look forward to sharing.
Result: Tick on the manager support, tick on the job relevance. Research suggests both these factors improve motivation to transfer (Noe, 2010).
Example 2 - Opportunity (post-training)
A study by Laker and Powell (2011) points out that soft skills are different from technical skills in that technical skills are more likely to be mirrored from the training input to the work environment. Soft Skills might take a while to come around.
Surely we can do something about that. Let’s use another hypothetical situation to demonstrate how you can provide opportunities for effective training transfer within your team of savvy motivated personnel.
Situation: Your team recently completed some training on Communication Skills. The team works in a lopsided hybrid set-up as your organisation, like most, hasn’t worked out how to actually make the hybrid model work well. You’re concerned at the lack of opportunity for your team to demonstrate and reflect upon their learning, and put their learning into practice.
Task: You want to create an online space where they can connect, share experiences/ideas/wins/fails, and reduce feelings of isolation.
Action: Create a short online meeting to avoid overwhelm. 30 mins should do it. Prep for your meeting by making some interactive features. I recommend using something like Mentimeter.com or something else very user-friendly. Use something like this for intro stages of an online meeting, and then the breakout rooms for chats in small groups, and finally bring everyone together to share again. Interactive methods are what you seek here.
Right. You’ve set the meeting time and date, sent the invites, worked out how to use an online interaction feedback app and prepped some schemata activating questions like: What are two key words you recall most clearly from your training? And then the tidal wave of responses create a nice little word cloud. Follow up with a question like: What have you been able to apply at your job? Is there something you wish to apply at work but don’t know how to? And put them into small group breakout rooms to chat for a short while.
Do post check-ins soon after training has happened to solidify goals of when/where/how your team will apply what they’ve learnt. It’s also useful to conduct another check-in a few weeks later to see how that training has evolved. If you’re with the same group long enough, you could add a later check-in again, or add it to your one-to-ones as time goes on. Actions like this keep up the maintenance of training.
Result: Intentional, organised, personalised opportunities to apply learning that has happened during training input increase the likelihood of that transfer happening.
Recap
Training transfer though long studied and practiced remains ineffective in many spaces. If we look to the extensive literature, we can find methods more likely to make training ‘stick’. Consider how you might apply the above recommendations to some upcoming training and improve the chances of the ‘transfer problem’ becoming - like shoulders pads and perms - a thing of the past.
Good luck, Professionals!