The purpose of learning and development is not simply to create more skilled or knowledgeable individuals, but to deliver improved workplace productivity and performance. Learning events, delivered in a few hours in structured environments, cannot achieve this alone: behavioural change takes much longer. To deliver great performance, organisations must supplement high quality learning with tools and techniques that encourage, support and measure transfer and application.

Every year, organisations worldwide spend over £500 billion on training that has no measurable impact on the way that people do their work. Even if we believe that training has purposes beyond improving performance, unevaluated spend on this scale should concern everyone involved in people development.

The underlying causes of the ‘learning transfer problem’ are well understood but practitioners have been slow to adopt remedies that have been identified, partly due to the absence of a cheap, reliable method of measuring the impact of improvements. Meanwhile, the patience of budget holders grows ever thinner.

ASK’s interventions are guided by our Stage-based Behavioural Transformation (SBT)™ methodology, and support organisations – and learners – in making this shift by aiming to give learners:

• the momentum to initiate change
• the self-knowledge to identify what must be changed
• skills that enable them to change
• support and encouragement to sustain change
• reward and recognition to ensure change becomes permanent.

One crucial factor in learning transfer success on which academics and practitioners are in complete agreement is the active involvement of learners’ line managers.

In addition to our bespoke solutions, which are tried and tested with major organisations across the world, ASK undertakes unique research into current practise into learning transfer, ensuring that our methods are constantly evolving and developing, using the most up to date information and understanding of what makes people tick.