2026 in L&D: Transfer and Transferability

As it’s Jane Austen’s 250^th anniversary, I thought an attempt at a literary allusion may be appropriate. No? Oh, well.

My predictions for the next twelve months in L&D are not grounded in the romantic and familial intrigues of the 18^th Century, although there is a timelessness to some of them.

This time last year, I predicted the end of the term ‘soft skills’. If it was ever adequate – it isn’t any more.

I also suggested two areas of focus: transfer and ‘how’, rather than ‘what’.

This latter is slowly starting to be an area of interest for L&D – not because old stagers like me say so, but because employees and learners are being more demanding. Perhaps they have been emboldened by 24/7 advice from AI?

I have observed people coming to the realisation that when they ask ‘what do I do when…’ they get pretty unhelpful responses. It is only when they go on to ask ‘yes, but how do I...” that they start to receive guidance or instruction that is actionable.

To maintain our relevance in a world where information about what to do is ubiquitous, L&D teams need to get on board with the ‘how’.

The remaining prediction for 2025 has succeeded in staying on my predictive charts for a second year.

Transfer

At the World of Learning Conference in October 2025, I was heartened by well attended sessions about learning transfer. I was also buoyed by the number of speakers not ostensibly addressing learning transfer, who referenced how we ensure application and implementation of new skills after a learning intervention has finished.

Conferences are always a beat or two ahead of the industry. We are always looking for case studies of new and innovative – yet practicable rather than fantastical – from conference sessions. So, although I am encouraged by transfer being on so many agendas of the L&D teams I meet and speak with, I still think it is yet to gain the real focus it needs.

I still see vendors of learning platforms and learning technologies discussing knowledge as though it is analogous to skills and capabilities. I still see course outlines or tenders for services or apparently authoritative articles from global consultancies, which make no distinction between knowing stuff and doing stuff.

And don’t get me started on governments and politicians proposing skills boosts for workers, which will be measured by the achievement of qualifications based on written tests and assessments of short-term memory.

But even those who do recognise that a skill can be improved by practice – and that it involves someone doing something to an acknowledged standard of proficiency – are not always immune to one fatal error. They confuse skills with tasks.

We are used to seeing programmes that will ‘help us to..’ and, maybe because we are driven by immediacy, we focus on the task we need to perform. The vendor, L&D team or manager will direct us to a programme to improve our capability in ‘handling difficult conversations’ or ‘presenting like a pro’ or ‘managing meetings’.

Now these programmes, done well, will enhance our skills, but they are overly focused on performing a specific task. Which brings us to the second prediction…

Transferability

If we take time to think about these specific contexts, there will be a number of skills applicable elsewhere. Maybe we could focus on the transferable nature of these skills instead of being limited to building capability in a specific task in a specific context.

This is especially true in a world changing rapidly – with technologies and ways of working changing exponentially around us. Limited capability to address immediate issues is important, but we can do more, have greater impact and build more skills of longer applicability by raising our sights above the day to day. We need to focus on the transferability of these skills.

I’m not saying, let’s stop helping people deal with immediate challenges they face and for which they need a fix, now. I am saying this is the entry point for building longer term capabilities which equip individuals to deal with change and be prepared, and able, to apply those same skills in different situations. Many of these situations we cannot predict, and neither can they.

This moves us above a concentration on an immediate task which needs doing. It elevates our learning interventions to build lifelong skills which differentiate humans from the machines which potentially are able to do some tasks better, more quickly and more effectively than we flawed humans ever will.

The eagle eyed of you will have noticed that the tasks/skills I outlined earlier are what could be categorised as ‘uniquely human’. Gen AI may help in these tasks but can’t do them for us (at least not yet).

Building a repertoire of communication behaviours which can be used, flexibly, in different contexts to achieve different objectives, is not a luxury for leadership programmes in fancy residential retreats. These are the skills of continued relevance. These are the skills of survival.

Given recent headlines about new entrants to the workforce eschewing verbal communication on the telephone, in meetings, in one-to-one conversations, these skills are both universally, and urgently, needed.

This has been characterised as a failure of the young. Once again, the lack of provision of the learning experiences required by a defined group is somehow their fault. They have been trained to perform tasks rather than provided with the transferable skills we all know are vital, but which are often consigned to the ‘too difficult’ box.

We should not be part of the blame game which finds fault with those for not taking opportunities they were never offered. We restyled educational institutions as commercial qualification factories – what did we expect?

To illustrate transferability over task/skill focus, let me give you an example.

I was recently part of a team building a coaching programme for a group of senior managers. The learning journey we created was focused on acquiring knowledge (important, just not the whole story); practising skills and gaining feedback; and applying behaviours in a structured workplace transfer phase – with support from colleagues and facilitators.

This ‘coaching’ programme didn’t mention coaching until around half-way through. Before that we explored, discussed and practised skills in communication more broadly. We codified the behaviours – providing real insight to micro behaviours which, like Lego bricks, can be disassembled and reassembled to be used as the context demanded.

Then, and only then, did we explore the use of the same behaviours for the purpose of coaching others. Importantly, the workplace transfer stage begins with behavioural targets, i.e. ‘based on analysis and feedback, what is your priority behaviour you wish to work on?’.

The transfer tasks may be about conducting coaching sessions but will also include other uses of this behaviour until the participant is confident enough to use it without prompting and it begins to be a habitually available component of their communication toolbox.

We started with a task – coaching. We progressed to review the required skills and behaviours. We built understanding of these behaviours, the ability to recognise one from the other and the ability to use them with intent before we asked them to practice in a coaching environment.

What’s more – the coaching practice was real. We asked each participant to coach one of their peers in their desire to improve their use of a priority behaviour. Transfer and transferability were built in.

Will more people in L&D teams think in similar ways as they approach the endless demand for new programmes to re-skill for today’s tasks? It is my wish that in this new year, it will catch on.

And to quote Jane Austen, from Sense and Sensibility: ‘To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect’.

Happy 2026 and best of luck in your endeavours.

This article was originally published in TrainingZone.