I guess it depends on how you define skills. I think most people would consider literacy and numeracy skills to be transferable. I've just written a shopping list and now I'm writing a response to your article so I'd say the writing skills I learned at school and university have been built upon and transfered with me in different jobs and settings. If you're defining skills as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking then I'm not sure I'd even call them skills. I think those areas are way too complex to be described as teachable skills. As a primary teacher I absolutely designed lessons to offer kids the opportunity to develop the 4 'C's that you describe but I'm not sure I taught, for example, collaboration. Rather I'd create tasks where success was dependent on collaboration. Post task discussion would again offer opportunities for kids to think about why one group were more successful than another. As to how these skills can transfer from one activity to another. Many people change careers through their life time. Now more than ever I'd think. As a head I often interviewed candidates for posts who'd come into teaching from other careers. Some having done a degree as a mature student. If they were good teachers their wider world experience was an asset. Were those transferable skills. Just been listing to BBC R4 Archive on 4, Comps about the history of comprehensive schools in England. Definitely worth a listen.
Writing an answer to a post on educational concepts after writing a shopping list, you aren’t „transferring“ the skill of writing. You are using the skill of writing exactly as it were taught, typing letters which make up words. And that’s as far as the skill goes.
If all you had ever been taught to write were shopping lists, you would still be unable to write an intelligible answer to a post on educational concepts, because „milk, apples, toilet paper“ wouldn’t be cutting it really.
Thanks, Leonore, that's an interesting comment. I guess I was thinking of the writing activities that I had engaged with recently. I think probably shopping list writing was picked up from my mum. She wrote a shopping list and I observed her and when I did the shopping for her on a Saturday or maybe in the school holidays I used her example as a template. Through my comment about my writing skills being built on at school and university I was implying that those were varied. Although list writing is an ever useful skill I think. I'm reminded of Margaret Thatcher's comments in a 1987 interview with Russell Harty when he asked her if she wrote lists. She replied,
" Yes, I do make lists. I am a bit of a list-maker, because there is a certain amount which has to be done and I make lists. I also get some sort of enjoyment from ticking things off a list as done, don't you? If you do not make a list, you forget them!"
It saddens me that this is even a controversial take. I’ve got to say, as a teacher, I fully agree with everything written and have valued the ‘Seven Myths’ book for many years. Yet, this agenda is being pushed harder and harder.
A great source of evidence against the concept of "far transfer" is Twitter / X, where you can watch lots of people who are very accomplished in some field make complete idiots of themselves when they try to engage in a different field.
I'd be interested in knowing more about "near transfer" (which you mentioned in your AEI article). For instance, I have this pet theory that highly educated Brits who move to non-English speaking countries and suddenly need to learn a foreign language from scratch struggle more than highly educated Americans do, and my proposed causal mechanism is that almost all English students (even those set for Oxbridge) drop foreign languages at age 16, never having acquired any sort of usable competence in their target language, whereas elite American colleges/universities expect 4 years of a foreign language in high school and often have additional language requirements for graduation. So, an elite Brit who moves to (say) Prague is very likely to be "linguistically naive" and be totally floored by Czech, whereas an elite American arrives with passable Spanish (it's usually Spanish) and can fight his way through Czech declensions an the rest of it. So, I'm proposing some sort of transfer: learned Spanish --> learns Czech. What do you think?
I am going to enjoy watching you make this case but I do agree with the earlier comment that it depends on lot of what is meant by “skills”. For example, I think sports skills tend to be quite transferable but obviously more transferable the closer the two sports.
I agree that very generic skills such “creativity” are not transferable and it may not even accurate to describe them as skills.
7 Myths remains one of the best books about how our education systems went so very wrong. I agree about this transferable skills bollocks. I think Sir Ken was responsible for a lot of that nonsense.
I agree with the basic argument. Isn't the main implication that there is currently just too much education happening, certainly in this country? If education doesn't improve "transferable skills" or general intelligence, there is no obvious societal benefit in educating people to degree level in non-vocational subjects. Specifically, there is no obvious benefit to employers from choosing such graduates over someone who left school with the same qualifications. And it would be better overall if degree subjects were restricted to vocational ones. The same points arguably apply to A level education too, assuming GCSEs are a measure of competence in basic English and maths.
I think the degree experience for many students is very different from a few decades back. My degree was taught mainly through group, tutorials and one to one. I struggle to know what many students gain from the 21st century university experience except the actual qualification and a large debt. Different I suspect if you're going Oxbridge. I definitely think HE needs reviewing and revising.
I had a genuine very different career swap, from spreadsheets and financial planning all day to writing long documents all day. I will say that my second career was always a side interest of mine, however the actual knowledge used was extremely different. There is nothing about my second career that I did in my first. I'm significantly better at my second career than my first, probably because I was also better at writing than maths, it's just a pity it took me so long to recognise it!
I agree 100% Expert domain knowledge allows you to be creative and make better decisions under pressure. In order to think outside of the box, you first have to have a box! My underlying human traits that help me be a good coach may be transferable: empathy, desire to improve, but they also may die in a different environment.
This is terrific and thank you for re-introducing your essay. We're on the same page; my recent pieces critiquing "learning outcomes" is a critique of transferrable skills that aren't even skills any more. Things have gotten worse as the focus has been for 15 years on teaching a list of skills to bee checked off rather than knowledge.
So true. It is deeply embedded in employability thinking and in how lots of people think about development. The whole skills based agenda in lots of orgs at the moment is this whole idea on steroids. It is so important to understand what domain you are operating in. Thanks for the thinking.
I was always a little baffled at how, from a british perspective, your alma mater mattered more than the subject you engaged in. Here in Germany it's kind of the opposite: it matters if you studied Engineering (or Arts), where you studied it is a second question only. So yes, the skills themselves are probably more highlighted than their transferability hereabouts.
We derive this from Wilhelm von Humboldt's educational reforms in the early 19th century, which ended up in establishing a "dual educational system" based on two pillars: one pillar is university education (degree courses with an academic horizon), the second pillar craftsmanship (professional vocational training with a focus on mastery). The difference is, though they are different they are equally valued, and paid. Having a master degree in plumbing and operating your own little company probably earns you more than a university professor (in wages as well as reputation).
You can find the same dual system in some other European countries, mainly in the east, and they probable share a common heritage. Dual degrees are highly appreciated across the world, that's how much "practical skills" count in education across the world. In some professions you will hardly see any british person because the just lack demonstrable "skills".
That leads me to the question what skills really are (if anybody thinks they should be transferrable)? Maybe we should take a broader view - those skills that you'd really want to be shared are commonly called "culture". Shared, transferrable skils is the very definition of the term "culture". Critical thinking, a perception of historical develepments, the meaning of arts and literature,... nothing narrow though. No practical skills.
What was, in the british founding notes of 1854, defined as "transferrable skills" I would, in today's language, rather define as "diversity of thought": e.g. having studied English Literature & Computer Science (myself), Religion & Politics, Music & Medicine etc. does results in somewhat "transferrable skills", and should be highly valued. It seems to add a notion of accessibility, making the constraints of one discipline visible in the other. IMHO all the innovation in this world comes from people who get their legs across these, and know their constraints.
In the school district my cbildren attend, there has been a lot of bjdget cuts causing people to junp from job title to job title in lots of departments. We took a man who has been notbing but a high school principal for a few years and made his chief of transportation - our busses are a crazier mess now than before. We took another man who had been managing the principals for a few years and put him in as the chief of human resources. It's not going well there either. What skills they may have had as principals do not transfer to other jobs within the school system.
As I only read DC's "Seven Myths" book last month (and it was written >10yrs ago) I put it to ChatGPT asking it to rank the myths in order of importance. Top came myth1 (facts prevent understanding, 10/10) and joint second came myths 4 and 5, myth 5 being transferable skills scoring 9/10.
It's not just in educational establishments (or the Civil Service, Corporate World or Job Market) where the Skills-Transferability idea exist: it may be well entrenched in the world of Influencer and Influenced - where the Influencer feels entitled to wax lyrical on something outside the domain which gave them influencer status.
The last few weeks have seen press reports of "The largest El Nino in living memory" (That one's from the Met Office) which may cause global food prices to rise as well as global food shortages. Although yet unseen I'm half expecting a Deliciously Ella type to chip-in on when to get down to a German supermarket to get "tinned-up", followed by a Bono type castigating us for "over-tinning" and being greedy.
And what I'm wondering is this: is the person who accepts Skills-Tranferability ideas more likely to accept ideas from someone who doesn't really don't know what they're on about but does have some other agreeable trait?
I used to give credit to the idea that mathematicians might have a generic skill. Exemplified by the famous example of Abraham Wald and what you can conclude by looking at the available damaged fighter planes. However, I’m currently reading A Bright Shining Lie and it is definitely worth using as a source for your efforts to debunk this myth.
It’s not that you won’t find examples of transfer. The problem is how inferior it is overall due to the failures in not understanding the full problem.
A Bright Shining Lie is the story of US involvement in the war in Vietnam and covers the experts’ debates both military and political. There is no shortage of examples of failure to transfer expertise.
I haven't read that, but I have read Best & Brightest by David Halberstam and I think it sounds like they are making similar points. McNamara and the Whizz Kids were very good businessmen and very good at financial planning. That didn't transfer so well to managing the Vietnam war.
I am very pro maths teaching and I think the reason why maths keeps invading other domains is probably because it does seem to represent some kind of underlying reality about our universe. However, if you apply maths concepts to domains you don't understanding, you often get garbage. McNamara et al are a classic example of this but I give another example here, of how you can't compare standard deviations of different things unless you have some domain knowledge of what those different things are. https://substack.nomoremarking.com/p/blooms-famous-2-sigma-tutoring-paper
Your example illustrates the point that for a general domain such as statistics knowledge of problems in one application domain can be applied in another.
I think it is possible that mathematics illustrates an area where there is a general transferable expertise.
This worked really well for the US in WWII but worse than failed in Vietnam. So the answer becomes there are transferable skills such as statistical analysis but they only help when there is a big deficit in that skill and they are applied with caution.
I guess it depends on how you define skills. I think most people would consider literacy and numeracy skills to be transferable. I've just written a shopping list and now I'm writing a response to your article so I'd say the writing skills I learned at school and university have been built upon and transfered with me in different jobs and settings. If you're defining skills as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking then I'm not sure I'd even call them skills. I think those areas are way too complex to be described as teachable skills. As a primary teacher I absolutely designed lessons to offer kids the opportunity to develop the 4 'C's that you describe but I'm not sure I taught, for example, collaboration. Rather I'd create tasks where success was dependent on collaboration. Post task discussion would again offer opportunities for kids to think about why one group were more successful than another. As to how these skills can transfer from one activity to another. Many people change careers through their life time. Now more than ever I'd think. As a head I often interviewed candidates for posts who'd come into teaching from other careers. Some having done a degree as a mature student. If they were good teachers their wider world experience was an asset. Were those transferable skills. Just been listing to BBC R4 Archive on 4, Comps about the history of comprehensive schools in England. Definitely worth a listen.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00316l1?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Writing an answer to a post on educational concepts after writing a shopping list, you aren’t „transferring“ the skill of writing. You are using the skill of writing exactly as it were taught, typing letters which make up words. And that’s as far as the skill goes.
If all you had ever been taught to write were shopping lists, you would still be unable to write an intelligible answer to a post on educational concepts, because „milk, apples, toilet paper“ wouldn’t be cutting it really.
Thanks, Leonore, that's an interesting comment. I guess I was thinking of the writing activities that I had engaged with recently. I think probably shopping list writing was picked up from my mum. She wrote a shopping list and I observed her and when I did the shopping for her on a Saturday or maybe in the school holidays I used her example as a template. Through my comment about my writing skills being built on at school and university I was implying that those were varied. Although list writing is an ever useful skill I think. I'm reminded of Margaret Thatcher's comments in a 1987 interview with Russell Harty when he asked her if she wrote lists. She replied,
" Yes, I do make lists. I am a bit of a list-maker, because there is a certain amount which has to be done and I make lists. I also get some sort of enjoyment from ticking things off a list as done, don't you? If you do not make a list, you forget them!"
TV Interview for BBC1 My Favourite Things | Margaret Thatcher Foundation https://share.google/PWGrI41zT056BWRYw
Hence her quote was paraphrased in the media as " Happiness is a ticked off list", which pissibly sounds more like Snoopy than Mrs. T.
It saddens me that this is even a controversial take. I’ve got to say, as a teacher, I fully agree with everything written and have valued the ‘Seven Myths’ book for many years. Yet, this agenda is being pushed harder and harder.
Great article, which should be widely shared.
Thank you!
A great source of evidence against the concept of "far transfer" is Twitter / X, where you can watch lots of people who are very accomplished in some field make complete idiots of themselves when they try to engage in a different field.
I'd be interested in knowing more about "near transfer" (which you mentioned in your AEI article). For instance, I have this pet theory that highly educated Brits who move to non-English speaking countries and suddenly need to learn a foreign language from scratch struggle more than highly educated Americans do, and my proposed causal mechanism is that almost all English students (even those set for Oxbridge) drop foreign languages at age 16, never having acquired any sort of usable competence in their target language, whereas elite American colleges/universities expect 4 years of a foreign language in high school and often have additional language requirements for graduation. So, an elite Brit who moves to (say) Prague is very likely to be "linguistically naive" and be totally floored by Czech, whereas an elite American arrives with passable Spanish (it's usually Spanish) and can fight his way through Czech declensions an the rest of it. So, I'm proposing some sort of transfer: learned Spanish --> learns Czech. What do you think?
I am going to enjoy watching you make this case but I do agree with the earlier comment that it depends on lot of what is meant by “skills”. For example, I think sports skills tend to be quite transferable but obviously more transferable the closer the two sports.
I agree that very generic skills such “creativity” are not transferable and it may not even accurate to describe them as skills.
7 Myths remains one of the best books about how our education systems went so very wrong. I agree about this transferable skills bollocks. I think Sir Ken was responsible for a lot of that nonsense.
Thanks Tara!
I agree with the basic argument. Isn't the main implication that there is currently just too much education happening, certainly in this country? If education doesn't improve "transferable skills" or general intelligence, there is no obvious societal benefit in educating people to degree level in non-vocational subjects. Specifically, there is no obvious benefit to employers from choosing such graduates over someone who left school with the same qualifications. And it would be better overall if degree subjects were restricted to vocational ones. The same points arguably apply to A level education too, assuming GCSEs are a measure of competence in basic English and maths.
I think the degree experience for many students is very different from a few decades back. My degree was taught mainly through group, tutorials and one to one. I struggle to know what many students gain from the 21st century university experience except the actual qualification and a large debt. Different I suspect if you're going Oxbridge. I definitely think HE needs reviewing and revising.
I had a genuine very different career swap, from spreadsheets and financial planning all day to writing long documents all day. I will say that my second career was always a side interest of mine, however the actual knowledge used was extremely different. There is nothing about my second career that I did in my first. I'm significantly better at my second career than my first, probably because I was also better at writing than maths, it's just a pity it took me so long to recognise it!
I agree 100% Expert domain knowledge allows you to be creative and make better decisions under pressure. In order to think outside of the box, you first have to have a box! My underlying human traits that help me be a good coach may be transferable: empathy, desire to improve, but they also may die in a different environment.
This is terrific and thank you for re-introducing your essay. We're on the same page; my recent pieces critiquing "learning outcomes" is a critique of transferrable skills that aren't even skills any more. Things have gotten worse as the focus has been for 15 years on teaching a list of skills to bee checked off rather than knowledge.
https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/look-on-my-outcomes-ye-mighty-and
So true. It is deeply embedded in employability thinking and in how lots of people think about development. The whole skills based agenda in lots of orgs at the moment is this whole idea on steroids. It is so important to understand what domain you are operating in. Thanks for the thinking.
I was always a little baffled at how, from a british perspective, your alma mater mattered more than the subject you engaged in. Here in Germany it's kind of the opposite: it matters if you studied Engineering (or Arts), where you studied it is a second question only. So yes, the skills themselves are probably more highlighted than their transferability hereabouts.
We derive this from Wilhelm von Humboldt's educational reforms in the early 19th century, which ended up in establishing a "dual educational system" based on two pillars: one pillar is university education (degree courses with an academic horizon), the second pillar craftsmanship (professional vocational training with a focus on mastery). The difference is, though they are different they are equally valued, and paid. Having a master degree in plumbing and operating your own little company probably earns you more than a university professor (in wages as well as reputation).
You can find the same dual system in some other European countries, mainly in the east, and they probable share a common heritage. Dual degrees are highly appreciated across the world, that's how much "practical skills" count in education across the world. In some professions you will hardly see any british person because the just lack demonstrable "skills".
That leads me to the question what skills really are (if anybody thinks they should be transferrable)? Maybe we should take a broader view - those skills that you'd really want to be shared are commonly called "culture". Shared, transferrable skils is the very definition of the term "culture". Critical thinking, a perception of historical develepments, the meaning of arts and literature,... nothing narrow though. No practical skills.
What was, in the british founding notes of 1854, defined as "transferrable skills" I would, in today's language, rather define as "diversity of thought": e.g. having studied English Literature & Computer Science (myself), Religion & Politics, Music & Medicine etc. does results in somewhat "transferrable skills", and should be highly valued. It seems to add a notion of accessibility, making the constraints of one discipline visible in the other. IMHO all the innovation in this world comes from people who get their legs across these, and know their constraints.
In the school district my cbildren attend, there has been a lot of bjdget cuts causing people to junp from job title to job title in lots of departments. We took a man who has been notbing but a high school principal for a few years and made his chief of transportation - our busses are a crazier mess now than before. We took another man who had been managing the principals for a few years and put him in as the chief of human resources. It's not going well there either. What skills they may have had as principals do not transfer to other jobs within the school system.
As I only read DC's "Seven Myths" book last month (and it was written >10yrs ago) I put it to ChatGPT asking it to rank the myths in order of importance. Top came myth1 (facts prevent understanding, 10/10) and joint second came myths 4 and 5, myth 5 being transferable skills scoring 9/10.
It's not just in educational establishments (or the Civil Service, Corporate World or Job Market) where the Skills-Transferability idea exist: it may be well entrenched in the world of Influencer and Influenced - where the Influencer feels entitled to wax lyrical on something outside the domain which gave them influencer status.
The last few weeks have seen press reports of "The largest El Nino in living memory" (That one's from the Met Office) which may cause global food prices to rise as well as global food shortages. Although yet unseen I'm half expecting a Deliciously Ella type to chip-in on when to get down to a German supermarket to get "tinned-up", followed by a Bono type castigating us for "over-tinning" and being greedy.
And what I'm wondering is this: is the person who accepts Skills-Tranferability ideas more likely to accept ideas from someone who doesn't really don't know what they're on about but does have some other agreeable trait?
I used to give credit to the idea that mathematicians might have a generic skill. Exemplified by the famous example of Abraham Wald and what you can conclude by looking at the available damaged fighter planes. However, I’m currently reading A Bright Shining Lie and it is definitely worth using as a source for your efforts to debunk this myth.
It’s not that you won’t find examples of transfer. The problem is how inferior it is overall due to the failures in not understanding the full problem.
A Bright Shining Lie is the story of US involvement in the war in Vietnam and covers the experts’ debates both military and political. There is no shortage of examples of failure to transfer expertise.
I haven't read that, but I have read Best & Brightest by David Halberstam and I think it sounds like they are making similar points. McNamara and the Whizz Kids were very good businessmen and very good at financial planning. That didn't transfer so well to managing the Vietnam war.
I am very pro maths teaching and I think the reason why maths keeps invading other domains is probably because it does seem to represent some kind of underlying reality about our universe. However, if you apply maths concepts to domains you don't understanding, you often get garbage. McNamara et al are a classic example of this but I give another example here, of how you can't compare standard deviations of different things unless you have some domain knowledge of what those different things are. https://substack.nomoremarking.com/p/blooms-famous-2-sigma-tutoring-paper
Your example illustrates the point that for a general domain such as statistics knowledge of problems in one application domain can be applied in another.
I think it is possible that mathematics illustrates an area where there is a general transferable expertise.
This worked really well for the US in WWII but worse than failed in Vietnam. So the answer becomes there are transferable skills such as statistical analysis but they only help when there is a big deficit in that skill and they are applied with caution.