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Job Fransen Returns: A Taxonomy for Transfer
Job Fransen is back. Last time, we covered near and far transfer — the gap between what you train and what you actually need to do. This time, we go deeper. Job, along with Franco Impellizzeri, published a taxonomy for the transfer of skills in sport, and it's one of those frameworks that immediately makes you rethink how you're building training programs.
The Pentagon's warfighter performance optimization memo is sitting in the background of this whole conversation — specifically the part about elevating cognitive performance as a readiness priority. Drew and Alex think the people writing that memo probably don't know what it means. Job doesn't disagree.
What we get into:
— Transfer isn't just near or far. Job and Franco's taxonomy breaks it down across 13 dimensions borrowed from Barnett & Cécé's education framework and rebuilt for motor skills. Reach, distance, and likelihood are the three pillars.
— Procedure vs. principle. If you know how to cook a steak on your specific pan, you're in trouble the second the pan changes. If you understand the Maillard reaction, you can cook anywhere. This is the chef-vs-cook distinction applied directly to how you design training.
— Why shortcuts fail. Far transfer is alluring because it's fast — skip the messy middle, jump straight from generic training to elite performance. The problem is it almost never works. The research says so. The practitioners pitching video game cognitive training to the Pentagon either haven't read it or don't care.
— VR and AR are not the answer. We tend to assume simulated environments are close enough to real ones. They're usually not, and the research is starting to catch up to that assumption. Job has a front-row seat to how sporting organizations get pitched these tools and how often they buy them anyway.
— The military problem is harder. It's already difficult to design near-transfer practice in sport. Replicating combat — the noise, the stakes, the threat of actual harm — is orders of magnitude harder. The chain of near transfers still has to get built. You just can't use most of the middle links you'd want.
— The three moderators that sink good practice design. Exposure, feedback and instruction, and learner disposition. Even if you design a perfect near-transfer task, you can blow the whole thing by getting any one of these wrong.
Mentioned in this episode:
Barnett & Cécé transfer taxonomy — the education framework Job built from
Job Fransen & Franco Impellizzeri — "A Taxonomy for the Transfer of Skills in Sport"
Pentagon Warfighter Performance Optimization memo
First Job Fransen episode — MOPs & MOEs, December 2025
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Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.
