Skills transfer is something that clients consistently put high on their agenda when it comes to hiring consultants - it is not enough to use consultants to solve a problem, they have to show the client's people how to solve it for themselves in the future. To quote Bird at Kepner-Tregoe again:

The best clients say ‘show me how, and I will execute'. Consultants have to leverage a client's internal resources rather than their colleagues; they need to have people who are credible, and consulting teams that are small enough to be flexible. They have to multiply their impact, not by bringing in more consultants, but by transferring skills.

Skills transfer was one of the aims of Ashridge Consulting's work with the Norwich Community Hospital. Here, the consultants helped the hospital's employees to learn, based on a combination of practical experience and analysis of how people learn in different ways. Kepner-Tregoe focused on training Sun Microsystems' trainers in order to pass on problem-solving techniques. At BT Retail, Edengene were involved not just in generating and evaluating new business ideas, but in helping set up BT click&buy, working side by side with BT's staff to pass on entrepreneurial know-how.