by Tessa Forshaw (NLL Doctoral Researcher) and Aubry Ma (NLL Research Assistant)
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Learning transfer is the idea that you can apply knowledge learned in an educational setting to a performance context. Traditionally, it was considered a process or outcome that should occur as a result of learning something. More recently, perspectives highlight the role of an individual’s motivation, the educator’s actions, and the contexts’ features in enabling it. While very commonly discussed in schools, very little attention has been placed on the role of learning transfer in a work context, especially for learning experiences that are situated in and during working.
A scan of the situated learning literature suggests that work-based learning experiences, especially when they involve many contrasting projects, should allow workers to extract things learned from one work context to an analogous context. This idea is naturally observed in many management consulting environments where workers learn how to perform a role while doing it and then transfer the skills learned from that role to a new and different role in the future.
To further explore this idea, the Next Level Lab is conducting a study with a multinational consulting firm with nearly a million employees worldwide. The study is specifically focused on employees in their North American Strategy Consulting practice and involves extensive semi-structured interviews of 60 employees about their experience working there– with a specific focus on how they learn in a work context and transition between new and different types of roles. Each participant we interviewed has been at the organization for several years, is of mid-career seniority, and has performed at least four different roles since joining.
At the time of writing this update, the Next Level Lab team is in the early stages of analyzing the interviews, and already a couple of strong themes are starting to emerge. These two themes can be summarized with two questions: Firstly, who do I know that has done this before and can help me? And secondly, what work products do I have that I could leverage forward to get started?
Emerging finding 1: Social relationships in work contexts enable and facilitate far learning transfer
The idea that learning is inherently a social process is not new; in fact, many educational practices and foundational theorists subscribe to this idea. However, specific attention to the notion that learning transfer is enabled and facilitated by social relationships is less established.
In an early interview, a participant shared that they thought, “Your Network is Your Net Worth.” They explained that who you know within the organization determines how well you are supported to transition between roles, upskill, and find opportunities.
This view was shared by others who also gave advice about the role of networking in understanding how to learn how to engage in a new project or role:
“I think you have to be very, very good at networking… not only from a talent management perspective and a progression perspective, but also an ability to find information on either client work that we’ve done that similar deliverables that we’ve done that could accelerate the work we’re doing at a client, etc. So, I truly believe if you are not someone who can easily build networks and navigate networks, it is really hard to thrive and exist.”
“There’s always some someone who’s done something before, and I think knowing that, and knowing that the people who had put me in that position were still there for me to help when I needed it, was kind of what gave me the confidence tools.”
“Once you have like a good understanding of the project and what you’re trying to do, look at our knowledge exchange, look, you know, find the community of people or ask your people lead whether it’s me or other people about who you know who’s done this before.”
“If you’re building out a solution, you reach out to somebody who’s known for that type of work. They connect you with someone else who says, oh, I heard about this project over here where they did something like that. So, you reach out to that person, you look at their materials if possible. And, and you, you basically just form this small network of people who, whose opinions you get, materials you may reference as you build out what you’re going to need to build and that’s your informal learning, but you piece it together yourself based on connecting with other people who connect you with others. So, your network is extremely important…”
Additionally, several participants gave examples of times when their social approach to understanding how to go about a new role has set them up to thrive:
“A lot of it was the shadowing and the work I’ve done prior… My senior manager would say, hey, you know, here’s how I manage the financials on a project, and we were in person, he would sit next to him, I’d see how the invoices were done. And, and that was something that I was responsible for. And then you know, it would be like, when you started the project, he was like, you know, I need you to help make a project plan.”
“She probably gave me six different people. And so, getting on what I would call mini learning sessions with those different people and just really downloading and trying to understand.”
“So, for that latest transition that I spoke to, I had three meetings a week for like 30 to 45 minutes to kind of like explain what I was thinking and then get feedback. And so, at the beginning of the process, when I was transitioning, I was you know, bombarding my team’s calendar.”
“I scheduled a lot of just one on ones with people who are already in that space who had already executed these types of projects before, just to pick their brain say, hey, we’ve got a 12-week project with this resources company. I see you did something similar last year. Can you help me figure out what were the things we were thinking about?”
Emerging finding 2: Participants sought ways to leverage existing work products forward into new work contexts
In each interview to date, the participant has mentioned leveraging existing work products – theirs or others – to start in a new role. This practice appears to be deeply embedded in the ways of working of our participants to date.
Several participants gave examples of times when they started their new role by drawing on previous work they had already done:
“I had this project plan that I made when I was a consultant that I can say, oh, let me just dust this off. And I’ve got a starting point. So, I’m not starting from scratch, and it was like the confidence of knowing I’d seen bits and pieces of this before.”
“I found helpful leveraging past work. So for example, for a new project, we need a new functional spec. You know, every project needs a functional spec. So it’s not from starting from scratch.”
Additionally, participants in a management position shared that sending templates or directing team members to an internal work product repository as a starting point was often how they supported team members starting new roles to get started. These served as “physical cues” to connect back to previous work and to leverage it forward in new tasks.
“You know, it’s a lot of sharing and helping them navigate and I find I send a lot of templates or previous client examples to help people learn. And, I mean, my thing is, we should never be creating something from scratch.”
“So, once you have like a good understanding of the project and what you’re trying to do, look at our knowledge exchange.”
“So, what I found myself doing anything with counselees is oftentimes and in this specific example to make it more relatable, is saying, Hey, look at the things we think about from that previous project and now shift those let’s figure out there’s a gap between the old rule and the new rule and shift that thinking.”
As this work continues, we hope to be able to identify and describe the features of situated learning that often occurs in highly variant occupations that continuously require an ongoing transfer or learning. We hope to understand how the transfer of learning is enabled between one project and the next and how it could be enhanced. And finally, we hope to understand how individuals in these contexts modify their environment, learning, and contexts to succeed in new roles. With these insights, we plan to create practical recommendations for how to encourage learning transfer between roles during work-based learning programs, particularly those in a workforce development context.