The most underused transfer mechanism in L&D
Robert Brinkerhoff spent years investigating why training doesn’t stick. His method was straightforward: after a programme, find the people who actually applied what they learned and changed how they worked. Then find the people who didn’t. Interview both groups. Work out what separated them.
What he found, consistently, was that the quality of the training itself explained very little of the difference. The learners who transferred what they’d learned back to their work almost always had a manager who expected them to, asked them about it, and created the conditions to make it possible. The learners who didn’t, largely, had a manager who said nothing.
This is not a marginal finding. Brinkerhoff estimated that roughly 15% of training gets applied in the workplace in any meaningful way. Of the factors that predict whether someone falls into that 15%, manager behaviour before and after a learning event is consistently among the strongest.
Where L&D puts its energy
The profession has known about the transfer problem for decades. Most practitioners can tell you that learning doesn’t happen in a single event, that spaced practice matters, that reflection helps, that performance support extends the learning beyond the course. The research is not obscure.
And yet, in most organisations, L&D puts the overwhelming majority of its effort into the design and delivery of the learning event itself. The pre-work is often light or optional. The post-work, if it exists at all, is usually a follow-up survey or a reminder email. The manager is typically an afterthought, informed of the training their team member attended rather than prepared to play any active role in what comes next.
Brinkerhoff called this the fundamental design error of workplace learning. The event gets designed. The environment around the event doesn’t.
What managers actually do with training
The problem is not that managers are hostile to their team’s development. Most are not. The problem is that nobody has told them what to do, or given them anything useful to do it with.
A manager who receives no guidance will usually do what feels natural: acknowledge the training happened, maybe ask “how was it?”, and then move on to the next thing on their list. That conversation, or the absence of one, sends a clear message to the learner about how seriously the organisation expects them to act on what they’ve learned.
A manager who has been prepared looks different. They know what the training was trying to achieve. They have had a conversation with the learner beforehand about why it matters for their work and what they’re hoping to see change. They follow up afterwards with a specific question, not a general one. They create an opportunity, however small, to apply the new skill in a real context. They notice when someone tries something new and says so.
Neither version of this is complicated. The second version requires about twenty minutes of preparation and two short conversations. The difference in transfer outcomes, according to Brinkerhoff’s research, is not marginal.
The harder question
If the mechanism is this well-understood, and this accessible, why does the profession so rarely build it into programme design?
Part of the answer is structural. L&D teams in most organisations are measured on what they produce and deploy, not on what changes as a result. A manager toolkit that nobody uses counts as a deliverable. Behaviour change in the field doesn’t always show up in a dashboard. The incentives push toward content, not context.
Part of the answer is territorial. Working with managers means working across organisational boundaries, having conversations about performance expectations, and sometimes delivering an uncomfortable message: the training you just sent your team to won’t do much on its own. That is a harder conversation than sending a completion report.
And part of the answer is that L&D, as a profession, has not always been confident enough in its own expertise to make the case. It is easier to accept the brief as given, build the course, and move on than to push back and say that the return on this investment depends on what happens outside the learning environment.
What this looks like in practice
Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method is partly an evaluation tool, but it functions equally well as a design prompt. If you know that post-training manager support is the strongest predictor of application, you design for it from the start. That means a pre-training brief for managers that goes beyond logistics. It means a short conversation guide for the follow-up. It means at minimum a job aid the learner can bring back to their desk and point to.
None of this is revolutionary. It is, however, routinely left out.
The most honest version of a learning programme is one that acknowledges where its own limits are. The course can build knowledge and develop skill. It cannot control what happens on the Monday morning after. But the programme, taken as a whole, can set up the conditions that make transfer more likely — and the manager is the single most powerful condition in that set.
Treating manager support as a nice-to-have, something to add if there is time and budget, is one of the most expensive decisions the profession keeps making.
This is the third in a series of articles on the structural challenges facing the L&D profession. The previous pieces cover training evaluation and needs analysis.