Over the next decade, millions of experienced "baby boomer" professionals will retire from industries like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, taking their accumulated knowledge and expertise with them. This represents a significant loss of knowledge that companies must address. The author discusses a recent book called "Lost Knowledge" that highlights this problem and the vulnerability of sectors like chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The author believes that converting existing training materials into e-learning lessons is an effective way for companies to capture and retain the tacit and explicit knowledge of senior employees before they retire. This benefits younger employees and prevents critical knowledge from being lost.

1. Harissa Mardiana
Lost Knowledge, Lost Opportunities...
Over the next ten years, millions of experienced professionals will retire as the "baby boomers"
come to the end of their careers. With them will go years of accumulated knowledge and
expertise with serious consequences for many industries including chemicals and
pharmaceuticals. Capturing this potentially "lost knowledge" should therefore be a top priority for
all companies.
Two recent developments motivated the writing of this article. Firstly, as noted elsewhere in this
month’s newsletter, I am experiencing an upsurge in custom content development. Increasingly,
clients are asking us to convert “old” training materials accumulated in formats such as hard-copy
handouts, overheads, PowerPoint files, etc. to state-of-the-art custom e-Learning lessons.
The second development is the recent publication of an intriguing and timely new book called
“Lost Knowledge - Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce” by leading MIT researcher David
W DeLong.1 In Lost Knowledge, Dr. DeLong addresses the impending loss of critical knowledge
due to the coming retirement of the “baby boomer” generation – the term given to those born
between 1945 and 1964 who helped build the modern Western economy in the post-war boom
years of massive growth and technological advancement.
Starting this year, when the first baby boomers turn 60, millions of experienced workers will retire
and take their valuable expertise with them – unless companies act now to capture and retain this
knowledge for the benefit of their existing and future workforce.
DeLong highlights the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors as being particularly vulnerable as
large numbers of R&D, engineering, and manufacturing professionals retire over the next decade.
For example, in a related study2, he describes how an investigation into an explosion at a US
chemical plant revealed that the engineer in charge had only been out of college a year and that
the operators all had less than a year of experience in the affected unit.
He also points out that even when errors are not caused by inexperience, “diagnosing and fixing
them often takes longer when veteran employees are no longer around to help.”
We believe that the custom work in which we specialize will become increasingly important in
preventing problems just like the one described. When a client approaches our company with an
assortment of training materials on some important subject and requests that we put the material
into an “e-Learning format”, the client, in effect, is using us to retain, in a modern easy-to-use
medium, the knowledge and experience that a senior employee has accumulated over his/her
years of work. By taking this 'Knowledge Conversion' approach the client company is ensuring that
other employees will continue to benefit from the expertise of a senior employee but without the
need for the senior employee to be present, i.e. similar to the situation after his/her retirement.
Currently, the main motivation for Knowledge Conversion is to save the senior employee’s time
which may be better used elsewhere. The e-Learning approach also allows trainees to study
whenever they wish using 24/7 availability on the Web, while obtaining the benefit of speed that
e-Learning provides (30 – 40% faster than traditional methods for the same level of
comprehension). In addition, the electronic format allows ease of updating and/or adding of
information. Increasingly, however, we believe that the main driver of conversions will be a desire

2. to permanently retain and utilize the accumulated knowledge that only years of experience can
bring.
DeLong looks at many different methods of retaining the critical knowledge presently in the heads
of “close-to-retirement” personnel. He points out that there are, broadly speaking, two different
types of knowledge: explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is easy to codify and can be shared
independent of its human source or it can be embedded in processes or systems. Tacit knowledge
“includes cognitive skills such as beliefs, images, intuition and mental models as well as technical
skills such as craft and know-how.” According to DeLong, many of the old ways of passing-on
knowledge, such as mentoring and coaching, are no longer possible due largely to the current
pressures of workload as well as radical differences with younger employees’ level of education
and approach to work.
The message from “Lost Knowledge” is clear: companies must decide what knowledge is critical
and build knowledge retention into their strategic planning and do so NOW before the baby
boomers retire.
We believe that Knowledge Conversion of “old” training materials to modern e-Lessons
mentioned above is one excellent way a company could start TODAY to convert in-house
knowledge, tacit and explicit, into a modern medium for ongoing training of younger and/or less
experienced employees.
Our methodology includes examination of the old training material as well as discussing its
background with the author, interpreting the intentions and knowledge-transfer expectations,
then developing the content. Finally, the senior employee is given the opportunity to study the
new e-Lesson and comment on its completeness.
Factors that would encourage a senior employee, and potential retiree, to participate in this
knowledge-transfer would be:
Desire to help his or her employer if retirement is approaching.
Confirmation of the value of a senior employee’s accumulated expertise during his or her career
at the company.
Acknowledgment of the senior employee’s contribution to the continued success of the company
by including his or her name on the lesson screens.
Use of storytelling to describe particularly valuable lessons learned during the senior employee’s
years of experience, to enhance and make the lesson interesting.
Using the senior employee’s voice as the voiceover or narration for the e-Lesson.
The main benefit to the company would be the preservation and protection of Intellectual Capital
that had taken many years to acquire.
As DeLong points out, “companies that introduce initiatives that burden employees with
additional tasks are doomed to fail”. Hence, the role of Skillpad in collating and analyzing “old”
training material, interviewing key senior employees, visiting the company’s production facilities
and converting the material to an electronic medium is more likely to produce success in retaining
critical knowledge before it is lost.
References
Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce - David DeLong, August 2004,
Oxford University Press. Web: www.lostknowledge.com

3. Uncovering the Hidden Cost of ‘Lost Knowledge’ in Global Chemical Companies - David DeLong,
Accenture Institute for Strategic Change. Web:
www.lostknowledge.com/pdfs/DeLong.TheHiddenCosts.1B8CC.pdf