Transferability Of Concepts: From School Knowledge Toward The Future Job

The concept of transfer has been for a long time a primary concern of scholars in the area of second language learning, but due to the high demands of the job market nowadays, also the concern of the entire school system, educators and managers as well. It is frequently outlined, that schools are not providing sufficiently authentic situations and/or environments to the students for the transfer of concepts and procedures learned in school toward situations or types of problems to be solved in the “reality”, or at the future place of employment. The student’s failure to understand same concepts in different school subjects, and how these concepts could be transferred from one to another subject, is already a serious indicator that the transferability of concepts is not handled in a proper way. It seems that this problem is also apparent while transferring concepts acquired outside the school to the same or similar concepts to be found in the classroom. To address the student’s inability of an effectively transfer of concepts, a wide approach should be employed taking in account several factors, e.g., the student’s understanding of knowledge, how this knowledge is memorized, the motivation to learn concepts, how the concepts are presented by educators in different school subjects, the transfer conditions, metacognitions of the student etc. By understanding all the circumstances which are causing the failure of transferability of concepts from school knowledge toward future jobs, retraining of workers at great cost in organizations could be avoided, as the changing nature of jobs nowadays emphasizes the need for a radical shift: to employ workers capable of transferring their knowledge to same/similar situations in job, quickly and efficiently.