What if transferable skills don’t exist?

The implications for schools, universities, and the British civil service

More than a decade ago, I wrote a book called Seven Myths About Education. Since then, people have often asked me which of those seven myths I think is the most important, or which has proved the hardest to kill.

I think it is number 5 - “we should teach transferable skills”, and that’s because it is one of the myths whose influence extends furthest beyond education.

I don’t think transferable skills exist. I think skills like creativity, problem-solving, communication and critical thinking are tied to domain knowledge. This means it is possible to be a brilliant creative thinker in one specific domain, and a terribly uncreative thinker in another domain. It also means that there aren’t any generic lessons or exercises that will help develop a skill across every possible domain.

But what about people who switch careers?

Whenever I write about this on social media, I get a lot of pushback - not just from people in education, but from people outside education. They will usually give an example from their own career to prove me wrong: something like “I spent the first twenty years of my career in one industry, where I learnt how to communicate, solve problems and think creatively. Then I moved into a completely different industry, and those skills stood me in excellent stead. How can you possibly say they didn’t transfer?”

My response to this is always the same: what were the two industries?

Let’s say you spent twenty years working as a financial journalist. Then you switched careers to work in corporate communications for a major bank. I can absolutely believe that someone could make this transition fairly seamlessly. However, that is not because they have generic communication and problem-solving skills: it is because the domain-specific knowledge required for each job is similar.

Let’s say that you spent twenty years working for a newspaper as a financial journalist, and then you wanted to switch careers to work as an oncologist. Financial journalists and oncologists both need to communicate, solve problems and think creatively. So can the financial journalist switch easily? No, of course not - because although we use the same labels - communication, problem-solving and creativity - the domain-specific knowledge underpinning those skills is totally different for each job.

What is the evidence?

I’m probably more hardline about transferable skills now than I was when I wrote Seven Myths. Over the past decade, I’ve come across a great deal of evidence I didn’t know about when I wrote the book, and much of it has strengthened my original argument.

Last month, I wrote a lengthy article for the American Enterprise Institute summarising a lot of that evidence.

Over the last couple of years, I have also become very interested in the historical roots of the transferable skills concept. Although the phrase itself is a new one, the basic idea goes back a lot further than you might think. In the 19th century, a lot of prominent thinkers supported the idea of “formal discipline” - which was that by studying something really hard, you would train up your brain to be a razor-sharp tool capable of solving any problem. The preferred “really hard thing” back then was ancient Greek. But whilst Greek has gone out of fashion, the basic idea of studying one thing that can make you good at everything remains.

Why does this matter?

In my book Seven Myths, I showed how this myth caused problems in schools.

But what I have learned since is that it also causes problems in universities, in the job market, in the corporate world, and in the British civil service.

Universities sell their degree courses with the idea of transferable skills. They argue that you can spend three years studying novels, or poetry, or history, but the transferable skills of “analysis” that you acquire will make you a great management consultant or accountant. I don’t buy this: I think the value of a degree is mostly in the signal, not in either the specific content or the alleged “transferable skills”.

The British civil service has an even more curious relationship with the concept. The founding document of the British civil service is the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854. The report was influenced by the formal discipline theory, and some of its practical conclusions are based on the theory. It recommended that the civil service recruit officials who had studied subjects like Greek and Latin at university, on the grounds that they would have razor-sharp minds that could be turned to any problem. Because those officials would have such excellent general skill, the report also recommended that they should move from one department to another rather than stay in one place. A lot has changed since 1854, but the civil service is still based on the idea of generalist civil servants who switch jobs frequently.

Over the next couple of months, I am going to post some longer articles here outlining this history in more detail. You can also hear me discuss the ideas on the EconTalk podcast, hosted by Russ Roberts.

It is easy to idealise the past and assume that politicians and thinkers then were smarter and more thoughtful than today. I read a lot of parliamentary debates when researching this article, and I was astonished by the way that 19th-century thinkers would airily assert something that made very little sense, only for their peers to hail them as heroic intellects. Some of these ideas have been remarkably durable, with the result that we have organised some important parts of the British state around a concept that doesn’t exist.

If you want to find out more, subscribe to this Substack and get all the future articles in your inbox!