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Welcome to this e-learning course, which is aimed at helping and supporting staff in implementing Knowledge Retention and Transfer, or KRT. We will explore the concept of KRT and why it is important, as well as the process and available tools. A collection of short modules on best practices is available if you wish to deepen your understanding of specific KRT actions. Links to these are provided at the end of the course. There is also a short quiz at the end of the course. Please respond to the questions to assure your learning is complete. You may also wish to takes notes as the module progresses . KRT is an essential process for capturing experts’ knowledge and transferring it to the right people. This may be needed if an expert is due to retire, leave or move within ESA. The KRT process applies both where the expert is transferring knowledge to colleagues directly, and also when knowledge is captured for a later transfer. ESA is facing a direct challenge to one of its major assets, its knowledge. This challenge is mostly due to the retirement wave that will continue beyond 2030, with ESA losing half of its experienced experts. The need for the retention of knowledge is in fact a common and important issue for many organizations. Let’s have a look at the example of Boeing, one of the world’s largest aerospace companies. Boeing had a high proportion of senior experienced engineers, and just like ESA, much of the crucial knowledge of the organization was held by these senior staff members. A program of early retirements triggered by a business downturn led to the loss of critical knowledge, which had disastrous consequences for the organization When Boeing offered early retirement to 9,000 senior employees, an unexpected request for new commercial airplane orders left the company critically short of skilled production workers. The knowledge lost from departing capable employees, combined with the inexperience of their replacements, threw the firm’s 737 and 747 assembly lines into chaos. Overtime increased dramatically and workers were chasing planes along the line to finish assembly. Management finally had to shut down production for more than three weeks to resolve the problems in the assembly process, which led to additional expenses of $1.6billion and contributed to an eventual management shake-up. We can see therefore how dangerous the loss of knowledge can be when experienced staff leave an organization. • If only we all knew what we all knew • If only we could find that knowledge when we needed it • If only that knowledge was never forgotten This is the core vision of Knowledge Management – that everyone in the agency has access to the complete knowledge of the agency, that they can find it when they need it, and that the knowledge is never lost, even when experienced people leave. Knowledge management is a discipline that takes ESA towards delivering the vision expressed here. So let’s take a moment to understand what we need for effective knowledge management. Effective knowledge management requires a way to retrieve knowledge from people’s heads, both as part of their daily work and before they retire. We need a way to store that knowledge and make it available and easy to find for new staff. And we need a way to ensure the knowledge is kept up to date over time. This means that old knowledge is withdrawn or updated, and new knowledge is added. So, what does knowledge management attempt to do? Knowledge retention and transfer is one part of the story. It focuses mostly on retaining knowledge from people’s heads and personal knowledge stores before they retire. Other parts of the knowledge management framework deal with the organization, retrieval and updating of that knowledge. In future, the more knowledge we can collect and organize as part of our daily work, the less we will need to capture when experts leave. The four pillars of the ESA knowledge management approach are Knowledge from People, Lessons Learned, Knowledge from info & Data, and Library Services. These pillars work together to maintain and continuously improve the ESA knowledge base in order to increase the organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in pursuing its mission. Knowledge retention and transfer is part of the “knowledge from people” pillar. You can find links to resources on all knowledge management pillars at the end of the course. ESA is presented with complex problems every day, and the people who use their experience and knowledge to solve these problems are the Agency’s backbone. However, when experienced individuals retire for instance, there is the risk that they may take their knowledge and know-how with them. Experts’ knowledge can typically be found either in their heads, or codified in documents or digital resources. When experienced people leave, it is imperative that their precious and sometimes unique knowledge, remains available to the organization. If this does not happen, a recovery action may be required to reconstruct the lost knowledge, sometimes from scratch. As we saw with the Boeing example, this in turn may lead to a slow-down or even interruptions in the organization’s problem-solving capabilities or operations. Boeing is not the only organization using KRT to address the risk of knowledge loss. Many other engineering firms are tackling the same issue, driven by the Baby Boomer generation retiring. In the oil sector, the loss of senior experienced staff and their replacement by more junior colleagues is known as “the great crew change”, and companies such as shell have well-developed knowledge retention and transfer programs. Knowledge loss is an even greater issue in the nuclear sector, and is recognized as a major risk by the international atomic energy authority. The potential loss of knowledge from retiring experts is a significant issue for ESA, particularly as 44% of ESA staff will retire in the next decade. Without a program for retaining and transferring knowledge, not only would we lose the results of years of outstanding research and discovery from the brains of ESA, but we would also run into major knowledge gaps which could prevent us from reaching our objectives. There are a number of factors which underly ESA’s need for knowledge retention and transfer:  Many ESA staff members have been working in ESA for a long time.  Planned retirement means we will lose 50% of our experienced staff in the next decade  It is not always easy to arrange a comprehensive handover with a successor – often the vacancy notice is posted only shortly before the retirement date  And finally, If the expert retires without handing over their knowledge, ESA may risk losing key capabilities The Knowledge Retention and Transfer program seeks to address this risk. Knowledge is strongly linked to performance, and this link is fundamental to the concept of knowledge management. The more knowledge we have, as individuals or as an organization, the better we can perform, provided we can find that knowledge. The more we learn from our improved performance, the more knowledge we have. This puts us in a reinforcement cycle – a continuous improvement loop – with continuously improving knowledge and continuously improving performance. Knowledge management, at its simplest, is ensuring that this loop is closed and applied in a systematic and managed way. However, if the store of knowledge is not maintained, and if knowledge starts to leave the organization as senior staff depart then our organizational performance may be severely impacted. Now let’s have a quick check on your progress by looking at the following question: Why is knowledge retention important to ESA? Choose all options that apply. Knowledge retention needs to be prioritized for the following reasons: - Experts may be extremely busy - They could already have a great deal of work to do before they leave - Capturing all their knowledge would take more time than is available We therefore need to focus on - The knowledge that is critical to ESA - The knowledge that only the expert has - The knowledge which is undocumented This is the knowledge, which represents the greatest risk to ESA if lost. This is one of the core principles behind the design of the ESA approach to knowledge retention and transfer – that we can never retain everything from everybody. Rather, we need to focus on the knowledge that is of greatest importance and is at greatest risk of being lost. We use several principles to guide our Knowledge Retention approach:  We do not run a full KRT program for every expert – only for those who hold considerable critical knowledge. However, all departing experts can use these guidelines to organize their handover (in coordination with their line manager)  We map out the expert’s knowledge, and select those topics of highest priority  We choose a retention and transfer mechanism which depends on the kind of knowledge in question  We create an action plan or roadmap These principles lead us to the process that ESA uses for knowledge retention and transfer, a process for mapping and prioritizing the expert’s knowledge and putting in place a roadmap of actions. In many ways this is like a risk management process, applied in this case in order to manage the risk of knowledge loss.