No matter where you work there are people with experience teaching people who need to learn. Everyone is part of this exchange yet few people know how to do it well. Now, there’s a comprehensive how-to manual for effective knowledge transfer: Teach What You Know.

Steve Trautman introduces simple, practical mentoring techniques he created for engineers at Microsoft, and has proven in many diverse organizations ranging from Nike to Boeing. This is real-world, get-it done advice, organized into a framework you can use no matter what you need to teach. Trautman provides common-sense tools to successfully pass along years or even decades of experiences: easy-to-use checklists, sample training plans, lists of questions, step-by-step procedures, and a start-to-finish case study.

Teach What You Know will help you orient new employees, support transitions to new assignments and promotions, prepare for employee retirements, build teams, roll out new technologies, and even move forward after reorganizations and mergers. You’ll learn how to:

• Create a plan for the entire knowledge transfer process
• Clarify roles for each type of peer mentor in your organization
• Set expectations for communication so you can mentor and still get your other work done
• Organize what must be learned into manageable chunks
• Develop a measurable training plan in less than an hour
• Uncover the list of information and support that your apprentices can’t live (or at least learn) without
• Explain the mysterious “big picture” to your apprentices
• Create one-hour “lesson plans” in five minutes
• Give a demonstration that is guaranteed to sink in
• Help your apprentices take responsibility for their own learning

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In The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management, David DeLong and Steve Trautman show leaders how to not only reduce the risks of talent shortages but also maximize the payoff of workforce and leadership development investments.

The concept of “talent management” may have become commonplace in human resource circles, but a lot of leaders outside of HR have a nagging feeling their organization still isn’t getting their money’s worth from these investments. Leaders recognize the challenges with recruiting, developing and retaining top talent. They know that boomers are retiring and that younger workers must be onboarded efficiently. They also know that critical shortages exist for key positions in energy, healthcare, engineering, aerospace and government. But senior executives often don’t know what to do about these challenges. Increasingly, leaders are wondering: Do we have who it takes to achieve our corporate goals in the future?

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