This is a big challenge.

It is easy to teach ( even if it is time consuming), but it is difficult to impart essential knowledge. As one philosopher says it, ” what is essential cannot be taught, but it can be learned.”

How to induce that learning — and impart or transfer essential knowledge I think, there is no fix formula. Every company will have to do it in a different way.

The Knowledge Handoff

“When people leave organizations today, they are potentially taking with them knowledge that’s critical to the future of the business,” says David DeLong, a business consultant and author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce. Whether it’s a key client relationship, mastery of an outdated computer language, or simply knowledge about where certain files are saved on a company server, every business has stored up bits of information and knowhow that isn’t written in a manual or recorded in a training video.