A Bridge of Understanding: Using Barriers to Learning Participation to Improve Transfer of Learning

This paper reports the findings from a field study investigating transfer of skills learned from a management education and development program back to the workplace. Moreover, it represents a partnership study between an executive education center (housed in a school of business), two business faculty members, and management education/development practitioners employed in the public sector. However, unlike other studies in the area, the longitudinal design employed here allowed the authors to investigate factors that impeded transfer three months after a managerial training/development event. More specifically, in using a conceptual model developed in earlier research investigating factors influencing participation in development activities (Author 2, 2005; Author 2 & Author 1, 2006) this study has an added dimension in that it allows us to understand whether barriers to participation identified in a different context can be used to explore perceived barriers to transfer after the training event.