Planning for Retirement: Knowledge Transfer
As larger numbers of staff retire at government agencies in the coming years, organizations must pay close attention how knowledge is passed on from retiring to incoming employee. At the federal level, over 70% of the respondents indicated that they are dealing with staffing issues due to retirement, while only 16.7% from state agencies agreed. Whether your organization is losing one person or a hundred, not having processes in place to handle the transfer of knowledge can cause critical issues.
Survey Findings
Only one-third (32 percent) indicated that their organization does have some type of systematic knowledge processes in place to capture and transfer employee tacit knowledge.
The retirement delays are only temporary. As the economy and retirement accounts rebound, the rate of retirement will once again accelerate.
Retirement is less of a concern given the economic realities, but there are still high priorities to develop new talent quickly, transfer knowledge and accelerate time to competency.
Recommendations
Each agency should develop an explicit knowledge capture and transfer strategy that will accelerate the time to competency of new hires.
Having these types of processes in place will enable them to identify employees with critical or specialty tacit knowledge and begin to capture and transfer that knowledge, either by codifying it or sharing it with others who need to know it.
Organizations that lack these kinds of processes risk losing knowledge critical to the organization.
