The Problem with Transferable Skills

Daisy Christodoulou

Key Points

• Despite the current vogue for attempting to teach transferable skills rather than specific knowledge, the best evidence we have indicates that it is not possible.
• Our cognition is tightly bound to context. To the extent that transfer is possible, it depends on domain-specific knowledge.
• To facilitate “near transfer” of skills, teachers must identify the domain-specific knowledge that underpins skill and carefully sequence their lessons and assignments.

Introduction

Spend any time working in education—either in K–12 schools or universities—and before long you will come across the concept of “transferable skills.” These are skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking that ostensibly cut across traditional subject areas and are needed for many different kinds of jobs and tasks.¹

There are two particular reasons why, in our current climate, the idea of teaching transferable skills is so popular. First, we are living through a time of dramatic economic and technological change. Students and parents worry that traditional jobs, and the bodies of knowledge underpinning them, might become obsolete if artificial intelligence outperforms humans. As the British educator Guy Claxton put it, specific knowledge might quickly date, but “the generic ability to learn has no use-by date at all.” Therefore, schools should focus on helping students exercise their “learning muscles,” which will allow them to tackle any problem.²⁠ Perhaps knowledge of the law will stop being valuable, but communication and problem-solving will always be relevant.

The other reason for the current vogue for teaching transferable skills is political. Political partisans often cannot agree on what facts are, let alone which ones are important enough to be taught to children. Again, the transferable skills concept seems to offer a way out of this difficult problem. Instead of teaching children whatto think, we should teach them how to think. Instead of making decisions for them about controversial topics, give them the critical thinking and research skills to make their own decisions.