Transfer of Training: Action-Packed Strategies to Ensure High Payoff from Training Investments

Broad and Newstrom make understanding transfer of training easy !!! Other relevant books that treat the subject: You Developed It: Can Your Training Programs Survive the Reality Test?

In my training and development career, some truths have been disappointing to me. The first was that many trainees never use what they learned once they return to their workplaces--what we often refer to as "transfer of training.") Back in 1992, Broad and Newstrom wrote this simple, easy to read, yet very powerful book on strategies for maximizing the likelihood that the training will be trainsferred. Broad and Newstrom provide more than 65 such strategies, conveniently summarized on the inside front cover where I turn every time I take this book off my shelf. The strategies are divided into those to be undertaken by trainers, those by managers, and those by trainees themselves. They list strategies to be followed before, during, and following training. This book approaches training transfer as a system. As such, the authors argue that transfer is not simply something that trainees are responsible for alone, but that it is a system. The research, experience, and wisdom of these two writers shines clearly through in a concise 200 pages. You don't find wasted words here--no flowery prose or irrelevant theories. You will find practical advice that can be implemented, and implemented well. You find that 40% of this book is dedicated to explaining those 65+ strategies and their implementation. You find case studies on two major corporations. This is my highest possible praise for this book: it doesn't merely sit on my shelf. I use it, and I use it while developing instruction for training classes. If you are responsible for training in your organization, and you are looking for ways to systematically improve the transfer of your training, I suspect you will use this book, too.