Time will tell: the evolution of transfer and application

As a company committed to enhancing and improving the transfer and application of learning, we continue to explore this vital topic not just through our working practice, but through academic research. My colleague, Robert Terry, has recently compiled A Brief History of Research into Learning Transfer which you can download as a PDF file.

At we enter 2010, our hope is that research is supporting our assertion that the purpose of learning and development is not simply to create more skilled or knowledgeable individuals, but to translate good learning into great workplace performance. This posting in our blog highlights some of the main findings of our review, and flags some of the issues that continue to vex L&D and HR professionals and budget holders (and learners and suppliers) as they seek to enable learning and development to fulfil its true promise.

It is estimated that training spending in the UK exceeded £38.6 billion in 2007 – equivalent to 218 million training days or £1,750 for every person employed. But estimates of the return on investment vary widely. One US survey suggested only 50% of training investments result in organisational or individual improvement; another found that transference falls from 40% of immediately following the intervention, to 25% after 6 months – and to 15% after a year. Cheng and Ho (cited in Gilpin-Jackson and Bushe’s article, important “Leadership development training transfer: a case study of post-training determinants”, The Journal of Management Development, vol. 26, no. 10) found that only 10% of training translates into job performance. This last figure is widely acknowledged in the practitioner community, which not surprisingly feels under pressure to prove that expenditure on training does create improved performance.

Reviewing this might, at first glance, appear to be very depressing. Why would anyone consider training to be a viable investment if this were really the case? But how far do these figures indicate that, by and large, we’re only assessing poor ‘training’. How was the ‘training’ defined? What was its quality? Was it designed with transfer, a strategy for maintenance and business outcomes in mind? And how much of the evaluation covered Kirkpatrick’s Levels 3 and 4 – the best measures of business success? (In reality, not much.) Bleak as these figures are, there are known approaches that can significantly improve them where the will to implement them exists.

So what do we mean by ‘learning transfer’? It can be defined as the effective and continuing in-job application of the knowledge and skills gained in training and development, encompassing both maintenance of new behaviours and their generalisation to new applications. Transfer has taken place when learning is not only applied (and applicable) but sustained: all too often, new behaviours are abandoned and learners return to the comfort of previous inappropriate methods and ‘bad habits’. This is, of course, understandable if the ‘training’ was never designed with a transfer objective or sits in an ‘education’ model (more of which in a moment).

While ‘the transfer problem’ was noted in the 1950s, it was as recently as 1988 that it became the focus of serious research after Baldwin and Ford’s groundbreaking review article, “Transfer of Training: A Review and Directions for Future Research”, was published in Personnel Psychology. Research since then has provided breakthroughs, not least in that it has focused practitioners’ attention on the need to enhance transfer and application and to measure and demonstrate their efforts in order to counter charges that training is often ineffective and to counter the corresponding tendency for training budgets to be a soft target for cost-cutting.

Some major hurdles have been chipped away at, although they have been more clipped than cleared. Not least of these is a pervasive but only partially appropriate educational paradigm: while an exam-focused educational policy presents its own problems, education is more about enhancing future potential than business application. Despite this, “training” was – and is – often defined in the educational mould. (As we all find it hard to move beyond our comfort zones, it’s perhaps understandable that academics might define research in their own image: the development of the notion of intelligence, for example, has similarly evolved to embrace more intelligences than those originally defined as IQ by those scholars who happened to be working with maths, language, etc. We know now that IQ does not correlate to performance, but that wasn’t always the case.).

Focussing too heavily on only one part of the process has also been a failing in evaluation, where we have only recently started to truly move away from evaluating the event and to start seriously evaluating the impact on workplace and business performance some months or years further down the line. Yet research in 2002 by Montesino found that HR professionals were often heavily focused on deploying state of the art learning techniques rather than looking at ensuring learning was effectively transferred and applied.

Another major hurdle is related to this (as we pointed out in an earlier post, Worlds apart – learning, training and classrooms): an undue focus on learning design. It should be easy to understand that designing to Learning Outcomes will be ineffectual when the real requirements are Performance Outcomes: even if the two are related, understanding is not the same as doing and achieving. Yet, as we pointed out in our The Great Learning and Development Conspiracy article, questionable buying processes (driven by timescale imperatives and the tendency towards lower levels of evaluation – themselves influenced by the comparative ‘comfort’ of quantative rather than qualitative measurement, a factor across many aspects of both business and employment that was singled out in Richard Donkin’s “The Future of Work”, reviewed here recently) are – in our opinion – an on-going factor in the often bleak ROI figures that are reported.

Post-1988 studies widened the definition of training, with some of them venturing into an exploration of soft-skills. Transfer and application is influenced just as powerfully by factors that precede, follow and accompany the learner’s time in the ‘classroom’ (and we use inverted commas to denote the limited scope of the word, which inadequately describes – and distorts our view of – the learning environment). It’s worth pondering the clustering of three high order factors that Baldwin and Ford proposed to see where influence lies:

Training design (delivery) – where the training designers and delivery have influence and should seek to actively introduce approaches that significantly leverage transfer and application (including pre-training motivation, ensuring that learning goals are aligned with business objectives, and providing technological support, to name but three of many), but where they may be restrained by the organisation and its intervention purchasing decision criteria
Trainee Characteristics – where training design can address attitudes and the motivation to change, learn and apply, but only where the organisation ‘allows’ the training designer to develop programmes (rather than ‘events’) that do so (you may wish to read about the KASH model at the HR Horizons HR blog); organisations need also to recognise the importance of supervisory support, reward and recognition strategies and many other factors where they can influence the motivation to both learn and transfer
Work environments – where influence is owned by the organisation itself, and where a lack of supporting activity or attitudes may weaken or even undermine endeavours to maximise transfer and application.

The work environment embraces such aspects as:

supervisor support and sanctioning
opportunities to apply and practice new learning
peer support
the organisational climate.

Where an organisation’s handling of these factors is weighted heavily against learning transfer, its learning and development budgets may continue to be money ineffectively spent. While the organisation may espouse the virtues and values of training, if it fails to encourage or provide real opportunities for learning and transfer of learning, it’s ultimately standing in the way of its own progress. (The Romanians call this ‘stealing your own hat’ – an expression for which we could do with an equivalent.)

Our critical review highlights areas where further research is still needed to enhance future practice, but there are already lessons for both providers and buyers. Making sure that learning has a lasting positive impact and achieves real business benefits means far more than simply designing, implementing, commissioning or purchasing events. It means a commitment to change existing approaches not just for designers (to campaign for design strategies that embrace factors that enhance transfer and application and a commitment to rigorous and meaningful evaluation), but also for organisations, learning and development professionals and learners.

From qualitative surveys, we know that development programmes that are designed with greater emphasis on the factors with positive correlations to learning transfer are measured to be eight times as effective as standard training interventions: our focus on emphasising strategies that support transfer and application throughout the design, development and delivery of all our interventions is guided by this understanding. We also understand that without effective transfer and application, learning and development is (or will be seen as) an expense rather than an investment. For learning and development to prove its true worth (and develop the full potential of those it seeks to develop), it must surely strive to maximise assets rather than add to potential liabilities.

It reminds me of a friend’s analogy – originally applied to people with a string of unsatisfactory relationships behind them, but (as we decided one evening) one that can certainly be transferred and applied. She called it ‘the cornflake syndrome’. You get up every morning, pour a bowl of cornflakes and eat it. You don’t particularly enjoy it, it doesn’t do much for you, you keep wondering why you bother. And the next time you go shopping, what do you buy? Cornflakes. Continuing with a diet that disagrees with you but doing nothing more about it that merely scratching at the symptoms is not the way forward. The answer is to change your diet.