Question

As my generation (baby boomers) leave the workforce over the next couple of decades, will the remaining employees be equipped to maintain the level of knowledge necessary to run American business?

This is actually a simple, but far reaching problem: A huge number of current employees who possess a great wealth of institutional knowledge will be eligible to retire over the next 10 to 15 years. In general, businesses have done very little to facilitate the transfer of this knowledge from more experienced (old) workers to less experienced (young) workers. The base of the problem is that experienced workers have virtually no incentive to pass their knowledge forward and younger workers do not see the need to be receptive to the additional “training.”

What would you suggest a company do to both encourage older workers to pass on their knowledge and for younger workers to receive the knowledge?

Answer 1

To ensure that knowledge is effectively transferred from the retiring baby boomers to the new generation at the workplace, the company can:

• Conduct formal and informal coaching and mentoring programs.
• Encouraging intergenerational work teams.
• Involving senior leaders as instructors, speakers and facilitators, in the Learning and Development Opportunities.
• Company can also use technology to preserve the knowledge. Tools like blogs and wikis can be used to develop comprehensive knowledge libraries of processes and procedures, which can be then, updated, and shared throughout the organization. Internal websites are also good tools for this purpose.