Failure in Personnel Development

A lack of training transfer at the workplace might be regarded as failure in personnel development. Only if newly gained skills during training and development are applied to the workplace and lead to changes in behaviour, personnel development is worth the effort. In the following chapter first, a short introduction to training transfer research is given. Second, literature about the so-called ‘transfer-problem’ is summarized. As past research has shown, it is not evident that newly gained skills are applied to the workplace. Different factors that were found to influence the failure or success of training transfer are described. In the next parts of this chapter ways to analyse and to improve the learning transfer system are characterized. The chapter ends with a case of a leadership training and describes reasons for failure in training transfer that are often overlooked in practice.