Transfer of Training Rate

Transfer of Training Rate

What is the real rate of transfer? I don’t believe anyone has performed a complete study of it, however there is one study that surveyed members of a training and development society (Sacs & Belcourt. 2006). They (see note below) reported an initial transfer rate of 62%. Note that the rate drops over a period of time, however that is another discussion.

Note: The participants included 150 members of a training and development society who reported working an average of 10.5 years in training and development and 10 years in their current organization. Their organizations employed an average of 5001,000 employees and comprise over a dozen sectors including manufacturing, service, and government.

Thus, 38% of training fails to initially transfer. There are two main reasons.

The first one is that some so called training programs are not really training, but rather more development or educational in nature, thus an initial transfer rate should not be expected. That is, training is done to show an immediate or near immediate improvement on the job, which means it should show a transfer rate. While development and educational programs are performed more to grow the learner over a period of time, thus we should expect lower transfer rates for development and education programs that for real training programs. Thus, the primary problem is that learning professionals fail to properly identify or categorize the learning program.