Using The Practical Training Transfer Method With Ian Townley To Design Better Training Programmes

It would be useful to understand your career journey so far because you have L&D and organisational performance experience. 

I've been in L&D since 2002. I started out as an English teacher living and working in Japan. After doing that for a year, I was approached by a training company in Tokyo, and that's where I started transitioning from teaching English into teaching business skills and professional development topics.

I was there for four years, and during that time one of the major figures in the company decided to start his own business. Eventually I followed him there, and we became  close working partners. One of the things we wanted to do was differentiate that company from the other training providers operating in Tokyo, so we embarked on a significant programme of self-development through what was then called ASTD and is now known as ATD, the Association for Talent Development in the United States.

We started studying areas such as Human Performance Improvement, learning transfer, e-learning, and a range of related disciplines. We gathered the frameworks, certifications, and methodologies because neither of us had come through any formal educational pathway that would have taught us something like instructional design. That's perhaps an old fashioned term now, but at the time that was the language that was being used.

As we were delivering programmes, we kept running into a recurring issue. People would complete the training and tell us it was fantastic. Then a few months later we'd meet those same people again and ask how things were going. More often than not, they would tell us that they weren't doing those things anymore.

We started collecting a huge amount of anecdotal evidence around why that was happening. Every time a new reason emerged, we would try to solve it in the next programme we designed. In many ways it felt like playing Whac-A-Mole. Every time one issue appeared, we'd hit it with a solution, only for another issue to emerge somewhere else.

Eventually we wanted to get to the root cause rather than continually treating symptoms. To do that, I took a year out and conducted an extensive literature review focused entirely on learning transfer. I read everything I could find on the subject. I brought all of that research back, compared it with what we had already been doing in practice, and from that work we developed a design methodology called Practical Training Transfer.

The central idea is what I call designing for application first. Rather than creating training and then hoping people use it, you begin by solving the workplace application problem before you create any learning at all. If you want to teach a particular skill, the first question becomes what would prevent or block someone using that in the workplace when no one is looking?’ Once you've solved that problem through design, you can then build the learning experience on top of it.

Our theory was that the fundamental process of how people learn has not changed for hundreds and hundreds of years and probably won't fundamentally change in the future, even with AI. What changes is how learning is packaged, supported, delivered, and made useful. We felt that was where attention should be focused.

That's essentially the journey that brought me to where I am today. The work I tend to focus on now revolves around what I call must-win programmes. These are major strategic initiatives where success is critical. 

Inevitably, that means working with managers, leaders, leadership pipelines, and organisational capability. Euphemistically, people might call that leadership development, but really it's about ensuring that those leadership and organisational initiatives actually bear fruit and create meaningful outcomes.

That’s a lot of great experiences we’ll dive into later. 

It’s never down to one factor, but from what you’ve seen, why do you think it's so hard for learning to be bridged into behaviour change? 

It's because there isn't a sufficient number of meaningful partnerships. If you take something like a leadership pipeline development programme, the process starts with HR business partners or people and culture business partners approaching the learning team and saying, "We need leadership development training."

The learning team then goes away and creates the programme. People attend the programme and then return to work afterwards. There may have been conversations with stakeholders beforehand about what people should learn or what challenges exist, but those conversations often happen in isolation.

The procurement process, whether internal or external, happens in one silo. The creation of the learning happens in another silo. The application of the learning happens somewhere else entirely. Those elements aren't connected particularly well.

That’s the biggest reason why learning doesn't get used. The people involved in identifying the need, designing the solution, supporting the application, and measuring the outcomes aren't operating as a single connected system. They're working separately, and because of that, learning struggles to become behaviour.

Going back to your time in Japan, what was the state of the training market like compared to places like the US and UK? Was there a big appetite for training, and is there still, or was it completely different?

Japan is a Galápagos environment in many respects because things work differently there. When somebody joins a company in Japan, they enter into a particular kind of relationship with that organisation. Companies feel a responsibility to take people on a journey from the age of twenty-two all the way through to retirement around the age of sixty.

As a result, organisations feel an obligation to provide development opportunities throughout a person's career. Employees expect that. Organisations expect it. Participation levels are generally very high.

Because of that, there's an enormous amount of training happening all the time. It's highly predictable as well. For example, almost everybody in Japan starts work on the first of April. New graduates are hired and begin on that date, and the first three months are typically spent in what is known as freshman training. Before they do any substantive work, they go through a structured development process designed by the company.

As training providers, we knew that every April there would be a demand for programmes that supported those initiatives. But that's only one example. The entire system is organised around developmental milestones. There are programmes designed for year one employees, year two employees, year five employees, year seven employees, year fifteen employees, and so on.

Training is woven into the structure of organisational life in a way that is much more systematic and predictable than what you often see elsewhere.

Would you say there's a much bigger focus on wanting to apply the training into behaviour change and there's much more focus on that in the Japanese mindset? 

Or is it the same roadblocks that come up when learning doesn't bridge into behaviour change?

Japanese organisations tend to place a great deal of emphasis on immersive practice. A simple example is the exchange of business cards in Japanese business culture. There is essentially one accepted way to do it, and everybody performs it the same way every time. To be able to exchange a business card properly, introduce yourself correctly, bow appropriately, and follow all of the expected etiquette requires a considerable amount of practice.

People start by learning those behaviours in the classroom. Then they practise them with colleagues in the office. Eventually they apply them with clients. There is a gradual progression from learning to practice to real-world application.

This reflects a broader pattern. When things are taught in Japanese organisational culture, they're often taught in that way. There is significant attention paid to practice and application.

Much of the work we were doing, however, was delivered in English and focused on global business skills. We noticed that those programmes often lacked the same emphasis on transfer and application. There was much less attention being paid to what happened after the learning event.

That mismatch between the Japanese approach and the English-language business training approach was one of the things that inspired Practical Training Transfer in the first place. We could see that something was different, and we wanted to understand why.

Your Practical Training Transfer methodology reminds me of the work conducted by Ina Weinbauer-Heidel in her book Why Training Sticks: 12 Levers of Transfer Effectiveness. 

I wonder are there crossovers with that kind of transfer work, or have you tried to make this more your own methodology?

I do know Ina and her work and a lot of what she found is valid. We weren't necessarily trying to cover that entire remit of transfer effectiveness or focusing on every element of transfer, such as transfer volition and some of the broader behavioural factors that sit within that framework.

Our inspiration came from a combination of Human Performance Improvement, which focuses on systematically understanding why performance breaks down.

The Twelve Levers work was emerging around roughly the same period as our own methodology. It just happened that both approaches were developing at a similar time. 

Ina’s work seems to have been more successful than ours, which is entirely to her and her team’s credit. But our methodology came from a different direction and focuses on somewhat different aspects of the challenge.

Thinking about AI now, a common refrain I’m hearing from other L&D professionals is that it’s neither inherently good nor bad.

What are your thoughts on how it could be used for good in the L&D space and where it might be detrimental?

AI is clearly an excellent content creator, and if we're being honest, people generally dislike creating content. One of the biggest frustrations for anybody working in learning is dealing with subject matter experts who arrive with an enormous amount of information and insist that every single piece of it is important. If you're not an expert in that field yourself, it's difficult to challenge them because you don't necessarily have the expertise to separate what's essential from what's merely interesting.

AI can do a significant amount of that heavy lifting. It can generate perhaps ninety per cent of the content, after which somebody with expertise can validate it, refine it, and get it across the line. That dramatically speeds up the process.

In fact, we've been saying for quite some time that we aren't interested in selling content anymore. If somebody wants content, they can often generate something similar themselves using ChatGPT. If they enter the same title into ChatGPT that they would have given us, they'll probably receive something broadly similar to what we would have created anyway. I find that liberating.

What AI isn't particularly good at is understanding people. I can take a training programme that contains knowledge and skills, give it to a specific individual, and ask them to apply it in a specific workplace situation. If they don't do that, AI can't really explain why. ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools don't understand the human dynamics that sit behind that lack of application.

That's where the opportunity lies. AI handles much of the content creation work, which frees us to focus on the human side. It gives us more time to have the difficult conversations about why learning isn't being used and what needs to change for application to occur. In that sense, AI has genuinely changed our work because it has created more space for the things that matter most.

What do you think of trying to balance receiving quantitative and qualitative data from learners to prove impact? 

From a qualitative perspective, I'm a big fan of something called the Success Case Method. That's Robert Brinkerhoff's work, and he's somebody I've known well over the years. What I like about that methodology is that it focuses on understanding why people were successful rather than spending all your time investigating failure.

The basic idea is that you identify the top performers in a programme, perhaps the top five per cent of people who seem to move through the learning experience with very little difficulty and then go on to successfully apply everything they've learned in the workplace. Those individuals have valuable insights into what enabled their success. They'll tell you about the shortcuts they discovered, the habits they developed, the support they sought out, and the various things they did that allowed them to apply the learning effectively.

Once you've gathered that information, you can build those success factors back into your learning design. If you adopt that kind of iterative mindset, where every programme becomes an opportunity to improve the next one, then organisations tend to see value in what you're doing because you're continuously refining the process based on evidence from real-world application.

Personally, I find that approach more useful than becoming overly focused on ROI calculations or even some traditional evaluation models where the conversation centres solely on proving results. 

The challenge with measuring impact is that it's hard to isolate the influence of training from all the other factors affecting performance. Unless you're measuring something extremely straightforward, such as the number of units produced or revenue generated, it becomes difficult to confidently attribute a particular outcome to a specific learning intervention.

Even when people achieve success, they usually can't tell you precisely how much of that success came from training versus something they read in a book, a conversation they had with a colleague, a manager's advice, or any number of other influences. Human performance simply doesn't work in such a neat and isolated way.

Because of that complexity, I naturally lean more towards the qualitative side. However, if programmes are designed properly and application is built directly into the experience, then you can gather meaningful evidence as people move through the programme itself. We design application opportunities into every stage of the learning journey. As participants demonstrate those applications, we can document and count them. It becomes something of a domino effect, where each piece of application creates evidence that another piece has occurred.

By the end of the programme, you're able to point to a chain of actions, behaviours, and completed activities and say, "Look at everything that happened throughout this process." That evidence becomes valuable in its own right.

So our approach tends to combine embedded application data with qualitative success stories that explain why people were successful and what enabled them to transfer their learning into practice.

On the subject of application, do you think there's a best practice for following up after training, whether that's two weeks, three months, or six months later, to make sure the learning is being embedded? Or is it contextual?

It's contextual in terms of what you're trying to achieve because every programme is different. One thing I'm generally not a fan of is the traditional approach where you deliver a training programme, declare the programme finished, and then begin talking about follow-up activities afterwards. In my view, if you're only starting to think about application after the programme ends, you've already lost people.

Once training is over, you no longer have much influence. In our case, where we're typically operating in a client-vendor relationship, it's highly unlikely that a client is going to give me unrestricted access to their people six months after the programme has finished. That simply isn't realistic.

Because of that, I prefer to build all of those checkpoints directly into the programme itself. Whenever something significant needs to happen, I make sure application occurs at that point. I require evidence that the application has taken place, and participants can't simply skip ahead without demonstrating it.

In that sense, application becomes part of the learning journey rather than something separate that happens afterwards. There's no ambiguity because it's measurable as it happens. Rather than trying to chase people six months later and ask whether they've done something, we've already built the evidence into the process itself.

What are your thoughts on people who are adamant that you need a certain qualification and may spend a lot of time trying to get it rather than applying what they learn, versus somebody who may not necessarily have the qualification but does apply the learning effectively in their role? 

A lot depends on where you're coming from and the environment you're operating in.

In the UK, for example, we have the CIPD framework, and there are various standards, qualifications, and professional benchmarks that are widely recognised. These qualifications have effectively become a business in their own right and are exported around the world.

It's common to see job advertisements stating that applicants need to be CIPD Level 5 or above. In many cases, those qualifications function primarily as entry requirements. 

I don't see a great deal of evidence that people consistently use everything they've learned through those qualifications once they're employed. The qualification serves its purpose by securing the role rather than by directly influencing workplace performance afterwards.

There are also cultures where people are strongly motivated to collect certifications and badges. Places such as Singapore and Malaysia have active professional development cultures where people are constantly looking for new credentials to add to their CVs and LinkedIn profiles.

Generally speaking, I don't place a huge emphasis on those things. We do have one programme where participants receive a badge at the end because it's closely tied to our own methodology and represents a meaningful achievement. Beyond that, I don't focus heavily on certifications.

My own experience of collecting qualifications is that most people don't know what they are and rarely pay much attention to them unless they're highly country-specific qualifications such as CIPD in the UK. Application will always matter more than accumulation.

There’s this idea of learning fatigue, where people have so many different options available to them now that learning itself can become overwhelming. 

I think it's important to be discerning about how you learn. From your perspective, what are some best practices people can use to recognise that and be clear about where they gather information from?

I’m one of the biggest critics of large content libraries. I really dislike the idea of presenting somebody with an enormous catalogue of learning options and then expecting them to map out their own development journey through that content. The assumption is that they'll somehow know exactly what they need, understand which resources are most relevant, and create an effective learning pathway for themselves over the next two years.

In reality, people are famously bad at doing that. Most individuals don't have enough information to accurately identify what they need, what will help them most, or how different learning opportunities fit together. Giving them thousands of choices often creates confusion rather than clarity.

My preference is to focus much more heavily on understanding people. That means building stronger relationships, which is where HR, people and culture teams, and learning and development teams should be spending more of their effort.

If you understand individuals properly, you can create development pathways that are genuinely relevant to their circumstances. You can say with confidence, "This is what you need, this is where you're trying to go, and this is the sequence of experiences that will help you get there."

How do you keep learning personally, whether that's particular mechanisms or your own path to getting what you need to be better at what you do?

I'm constantly reading. I also make a point of attending events and conferences whenever possible. Industry events are valuable because they allow you to meet people, attend sessions, hear different perspectives, and stay connected to what's happening across the profession.

I also try to leverage my professional network as much as possible. Academic knowledge is important, but practical knowledge is even more valuable. Understanding what your peers are doing, what is working well, what isn't working, what organisations are experimenting with, and where people are finding success provides a perspective that you can't always get from books or research papers alone.