Few organizations can say with any degree of certainty that they will have the workforce they need to hit their strategy 1 – 3 years from now. Over the past two decades, a new field has emerged to assess and methodically reduce talent risks, and to enable an organization to protect its “secret sauce”—the unique and vital knowledge that keeps the day-to-day operation in motion, drives creativity and innovation, and sets it apart from the competition. We call this field knowledge transfer.

Definition: Knowledge transfer means replicating the expertise, wisdom, and skills of critical professionals in the heads and hands of their coworkers. Although knowledge transfer is often associated with on-the-job training and mentoring, it means more than this. Simply put, it moves the right skills at the right time to keep a workforce prepared, productive, innovative, and competitive.

Knowledge transfer includes the measurable transfer on-the-job of both explicit skills as well as implicit or tacit knowledge. The key issue for us is: if knowledge transfer is how people learn to do their jobs, what can we do to make the critical, high priority knowledge transfer happen faster, with less stress, and with greater predictability and consistency? We can help our experts to replicate their secret sauce by intentionally answering four big questions for them: 1. What knowledge and skills should you be teaching? 2. When should you teach it? 3. Who should you teach it to? And, 4. How can you teach it best?

Eight Common Knowledge Transfer Misconceptions:

1. “We’re different—our knowledge is too complex, specialized, instinctive, political, situational, tactile [add your favorite adjective here] to be transferred.”—No, any expert’s knowledge and wisdom, from any line of work, can be packaged and measurably transferred, so long as the apprentice has the capacity to learn it.
2. “We already have knowledge transfer covered.” Rarely true. What’s more likely—for the few organizations actually tackling this problem—is that you have an existing knowledge transfer program that is not being measured, which means you don’t really know if you’ve got it covered. 
3. “We’re just too busy. Our experts can’t take time out for a ‘formal’ or concentrated knowledge transfer effort.” The process is quicker than you think.  And, if replicating your experts’ skills to reduce risk is deemed a critical priority, then you have to prioritize and efficiently weave this work into the tasks your experts already undertake.
4. “Our experts don’t want to teach.” Almost never true; they just need better direction and tools.
5. “You need nice people with good social skills to be mentors who share their knowledge. Only a few of our experts are like that.” The knowledge transfer process works independent of an expert’s degree of social skills.
6. “Our experts are not even located in the same country as their coworkers. Knowledge transfer from a distance is too hard. We have to put people on planes to get anything done, and that’s expensive.” Proximity helps but is not necessary for knowledge transfer. A clear framework for the knowledge transfer process usually mitigates distance problems.
7. “Knowledge transfer feels like just another ‘flavor of the month’ corporate initiative and there are too many of those already.” With talent shortages already hitting over 50% of America’s workforce, demographic data indicates that the need for knowledge transfer will remain of strategic importance for decades to come, and should warrant consideration at the top of your priority list.
8. “Knowledge transfer is really an aging worker problem and our team has plenty of younger employees.” An employee can leave at any time, so it’s a myth that having younger workers reduces your risk. The real risk is employees with unique knowledge that is siloed in your organization—or heading out the door.

Common Business Challenges Solved through Knowledge Transfer

Some typical applications for knowledge transfer in business today are: faster onboarding/ramp up to productivity; minimizing the knowledge loss impact of retiring workers; responding to emergency knowledge transfer needs, such as the unexpected loss of a critical expert; driving innovation; setting best practice standards and improving consistency; product training from a vendor to a customer; engagement and retention of Millennials; reducing safety incidents and worker attrition; load leveling to reduce overreliance on one expert; and working with offshore partners.

What “Good” Looks Like

Whether you are looking to develop an in-house knowledge transfer solution or hire out-of-house consultants to guide you, we hope you will be smart consumers of knowledge transfer investments. Good knowledge transfer programs should: