Train-the-trainer in the canton of Genève: how can transfer between French and English be checked?

Genève brings together international organisations, private banks, commodity trading houses and watch brands within a small area, with highly multicultural teams in which French and English coexist. For SHR's train-the-trainer programme, the management question is specific: how can we check that learning remains usable when the work situation, and possibly its language, changes?

What the literature establishes

In their literature review, Timothy T. Baldwin and J. Kevin Ford (1988, Personnel Psychology) distinguish learning during training from its generalisation to work and its maintenance over time. Their framework links transfer to trainee characteristics, training design and the work environment. Clear instructional delivery is therefore not sufficient evidence that participants will use what they have learned.

Retrieving knowledge rather than rereading it

In experiments using prose passages, Henry L. Roediger III and Jeffrey D. Karpicke (2006, Psychological Science) showed that recall tests supported delayed retention more effectively than repeated study. The finding distinguishes the ease experienced during study from the ability to retrieve information later. For trainers, it supports including opportunities for participants to reconstruct an explanation without their materials, without treating that exercise as proof of professional competence.

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that a questionnaire in English after a session in French demonstrates transfer. That goes too far: recalling a rule, understanding its wording in another language and applying it to an ambiguous situation are distinct demands. In a hypothetical example from a private bank in Genève, reproducing the steps of a procedure would not yet prove an ability to identify a case requiring escalation. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What the evidence does not establish

Neither article evaluates SHR training or studies bilingual teams in Genève. The recall experiments use materials and conditions that do not reproduce the complexity of an international organisation, a watchmaking workshop or a commodity trading house. In practice, an error in an English-language exercise may indicate a language difficulty, insecure knowledge or poorly designed instructions: an overall score does not distinguish between them.

A practical check in Genève

In a hypothetical train-the-trainer workshop in Genève, each participant could design two comparable cases from their sector, one in French and one in English: a banking file requiring escalation, a handover in an international organisation, a watchmaking quality check or a documentation issue in commodity trading. One week after learning, trainees would solve these cases without supporting materials, using a rubric that separates the correct decision, its justification and language comprehension difficulties; the order of the languages would be alternated across participants. The measure would be the proportion of cases containing both a correct decision and a justification meeting predefined criteria, reported separately for each language. This check would provide a starting point for adjusting the training, without automatically attributing a difference to language or claiming to demonstrate lasting workplace transfer. To go further: explore the Train the Trainer training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Train the Trainer in Geneva

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