Transfer sounds brilliant on paper.
It's not so brilliant in practice.
The idea is seductively simple: learn something in one place, apply it somewhere else. Knowledge as portable luggage. Skills that travel well. Training that actually sticks when people leave the classroom.
Educational theorists love this concept of ‘Transfer’ . They've built entire frameworks around it. Transfer promises that investment in learning pays dividends across contexts. Spend money on training, watch productivity soar everywhere. It's the holy grail of professional development.
Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?
Complete bollocks, frankly.
Here's what actually happens: people learn something, then try to use it, and it doesn't work, damn it. What is happening? The gap between classroom and reality isn't a minor inconvenience; it's a chasm; a grand canyon sized gap we tell students to just jump.
We pretend learning and applying are tidy, separate boxes. They're not.
Informal learning figured this out ages ago. There are no neat boundaries, just messy overlap everywhere. "Boundary crossing" is what they call it. And I prefer this concept that admits this chaos exists and embraces is. People don't acquire knowledge in chunks; they gradually get comfortable with bits and pieces. People, tools, contexts. All jumbled together in one messy process.
Someone enters a learning space and picks up skills. Great. Then reality smacks them sideways with situations their training never covered. The student learns how to work with elderly people, and then mr Jones who has diabetes gets a hypo while mrs. Johnson who haas dementia is screaming in his ear that the Germans are bombing. At the same time the fire-alarm goes off.
Never learned that in school, yet it’s a valuable lesson.
Every application creates new problems. It's participatory, sure, but it's also relentless.
I often use the passport metaphor a lot. Its works because traveling is exhausting. You're constantly shuttling between known and unknown territory. Most people give up during those crossing moments; when their shiny new knowledge proves useless, or when everyone expects them to know something they were never taught.
Learning means living in permanent limbo between familiar and foreign. The mentors job isn't to eliminate this tension: It's to help people survive it. You must connect practice with reality, or the whole thing you try to build falls apart.
This happens on three levels.
Personal level: everyone with skin in the game: supervisors, candidates, coaches, mentors the lot.
Organizational level: company culture, trade colleges, training outfits.
System level: try explaining government bureaucracy to someone from a construction site. Good luck with that.
Build proper bridges at all three levels, or watch people drown in the gaps. That’s the basic choice.
Learning environments include everything people, culture, circumstances. The lot. Zitter and Hoeve, two dutch researchers called some bits "designable elements" back in 2012. Smart.
These are the parts you can actually control.
You can't engineer learning itself. That's delusion. But you can engineer where it happens. Behavior resists design, but it responds to influence. Focus on what you can actually change.
Gibson, another researcher had it right with "affordances";environmental cues that practically shout "do something!" These depend entirely on people's capabilities and available resources.
No resources, no action. Simple as that.
Make these cues obvious at the right moments by giving people proper tools. Then maybe they won't miss the obvious stuff that trips everyone up.
The real question: who are we talking about, and what's actually broken for them? Answer that properly, and you can deploy the right affordances instead of scattering them like confetti.
A candidate's development environment is not a detached, separate cleanroom with real life and education in different corners; is everything surrounding them all at once; social dynamics, cultural context, situational reality.
Get this right, and learning might actually stick for once.