Pokémon games tend to evolve in small or significant ways over the course of the series. For Sword and Shield, one of the things that has changed is the EXP share. If you are wondering how to disable this feature, we have bad news for you.
Can you turn off EXP share in Pokémon Sword and Shield?
In Sword and Shield, the EXP share is always active and there is no way to turn it off. Experience Sharing shares experience gained among all Pokémon in a party. Previously in the series, the EXP share was an actual in-game item. It was later changed to a menu option. In Sword and Shield, the menu option is gone and the feature is still enabled.
The reason for this is that the devs noticed that the vast majority of players still had the feature enabled, so they changed that from default. They were comfortable removing the option to turn off the game, as long as they could still provide people with a way to level up each Pokemon if they so wished.
What you'll need to do now if you want to train an individual Pokémon is place it in the Pokémon Center while you do so. This requires a bit of pre-planning, as you'll need to be near a Pokemon Center when you decide to do this. It's never nice to lose an option in a game, especially when it comes to pure convenience, but with no way to turn off the EXP share in Sword and Shield, it's the only option available.
