By William Seidman
Are a lot of your company’s best people approaching retirement? The prospect of losing expertise at a high rate can be more than a little frightening. We get numerous inquiries about this.
Not many organizations take this seriously enough to fund programs or change daily routine sufficiently to prepare for this. Why? I think because it’s seen as a future problem, and not big or bad enough to tackle now. The executives who make the funding and priority decisions don’t want to plan around it – after all, they’ll be retired themselves before it hits, and they don’t want to rock the boat. It’s not a sudden crisis, but rather a slow loss of capability – sometimes so slow as to be barely noticeable.
An alternative way of framing this problem is to state it as a crisis in the protection of critical knowlege. This is what’s lost when great people retire, and what’s so important to preserve. David DeLong has said that “This is a huge problem for the nuclear industry, because it goes without saying that it can’t afford to make a single mistake.”
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
For me, as a competency manager in the IT ERP industry, the retirement issue has not been so critical as attrition has been. This has been compounded by an ambivalent attitude towards what core competency needs to be developed (within the company) and what needs to be outsourced. In such a situation, the best knowledge workers leave while the market outside is good and there is not enough bench strength available to take on the knowledge transfer in a relatively short period of time. As a result, we deploy band aid solutions (temp contractors, reshuffling resources etc.) instead of looking ahead on where competency is to be built and retained and where we could outsource the skills without feeling the pain. Companies will have to bite the bullet at some time and earlier, the better.
Jake has nailed the problem on the head. It is not just a retiring knowledge worker problem (actually some of those ready to retire people retired long ago). Having the absolute best practice captured and ready for the next person gives that new person a platform to grow from instead of having to build the platform again. Those that face this every day know how difficult it is to deal with. Senior management must be alerted to the issue and address it before it is compounded with the loss of those retiring.
Well put. Our firm is an organizational development firm using the Cerebyte technology to assist clients with an intuitive structure to secure, organize and deploy key knowledge. But it is the leadership / management that creates the readiness and support to use it. Knowledge not applied does support improved performance. And that’s hard in so many highly reactive business environments.