IA on the job: what remains of training back at work?
A convincing demonstration can leave everyday practices unchanged. For SHR’s “IA on the job” programme, the management question is specific: what conditions enable learning acquired during training to be applied to a different case back at work?
What the literature establishes
Timothy T. Baldwin and J. Kevin Ford (1988, Personnel Psychology) distinguish learning during training from its transfer: generalisation to work and maintenance over time. Their review organises the factors affecting transfer around trainee characteristics, training design and the work environment. Successfully completing an exercise is therefore evidence of learning, not proof of sustained application.
Why professional knowledge matters
Wesley M. Cohen and Daniel A. Levinthal (1990, Administrative Science Quarterly) develop the concept of absorptive capacity: prior knowledge contributes to recognising the value of new information, assimilating it and applying it. Their framework concerns learning and innovation in organisations, not generative assistants. Applied to AI as a working hypothesis, it suggests connecting exercises to professional knowledge rather than teaching only how to phrase prompts.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that training everyone on their own documents is sufficient. Resemblance to everyday work may make an exercise easier without demonstrating that the person can adapt the approach to a different situation. The issue is therefore not simply reproducing a familiar procedure, but knowing when it remains appropriate and when it needs to change. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these studies cannot establish
These articles predate generative AI and do not measure the effectiveness of the “IA on the job” programme. They provide an analytical framework, not an estimate of its effects. In practice, limited reuse may also reflect a lack of access to an approved tool, available time or suitable tasks: immediately attributing it to a skills deficit would be premature.
A practical check in Lugano
In Lugano, SHR could offer managers at a bank, a fashion company, a trading firm or an Italian-speaking family SME a check two weeks after training, using a new case comparable to the exercise, either fictional or approved for the tool being used. For each participant, a subject-matter evaluator would examine a work record in Italian against three predefined criteria: a justified choice of approach, adaptation to the case and a documented check of the result, without guidance from the trainer. The indicator would be the proportion of participants meeting all three criteria among those who had an actual opportunity to perform the task; those without an opportunity would be counted separately. This record would document transfer shortly after training, without independently demonstrating a causal training effect or sustained application. To go further: explore the AI on the Job training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: AI on the Job in Lugano
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