As organizations prepare for workforce retirements, knowledge management should be a key element of any effective succession planning strategy, ensuring a culture of ongoing learning and stability. This piece explores the challenges organizations face in capturing and transferring critical knowledge, alongside practical knowledge management strategies to address them and build more sustainable knowledge-sharing practices.
The Retirement Cliff and Its Implications
The “retirement cliff” refers to the impending wave of retirements as a significant portion of the workforce—particularly Baby Boomers—reaches retirement age. According to labor market trends, millions of experienced professionals are set to retire in the coming years, posing a critical challenge for organizations. The departure of seasoned employees risks the loss of institutional knowledge, technical expertise, and key relationships, leading to operational disruptions and costly efforts to regain lost expertise.
One of the most immediate financial consequences Enterprise Knowledge has seen on several of our engagements is the growing reliance on retirees returning as contractors to fill knowledge and capability gaps, often at significantly higher costs than their original salaries. While this can provide a short-term fix, it also creates a long-term liability. Research from Harvard Business Review and other labor market analyses shows that rehiring former employees without structured knowledge transfer can perpetuate a cycle of dependency, inflate workforce costs, and suppress the development of internal talent. Organizations may pay premium contract rates while still losing institutional knowledge over time, especially if critical expertise remains undocumented or siloed. Without proactive strategies, such as structured succession planning, mentoring, and systematic knowledge capture, organizations risk operational disruption, weakened continuity, and increased turnover-related costs that can amount to billions of dollars annually.
The Role of Knowledge Management in Succession Planning
Knowledge management plays a vital role in succession planning by implementing systems and practices that ensure critical expertise is systematically captured and transferred across generations of employees. Documenting key insights, best practices, and institutional knowledge is essential for mitigating the risk of knowledge loss. This process helps to strengthen organizational continuity and ensures that employees have the knowledge they need to perform their roles effectively and make informed decisions.
The Retirement Cliff: Challenges & Solutions
| Challenge | Solution |
| Employee Resistance: Staff hesitate to share knowledge if it feels risky, time-consuming, or undervalued. | Build trust, emphasize benefits, and use incentives or recognition programs to encourage sharing. |
| Cultural Barriers & Siloes: Rigid hierarchies and disconnected teams block collaboration and cross-functional flow. | Foster collaboration through Communities of Practice, cross-team projects, and leadership modeling knowledge sharing. |
| Resource Constraints: KM is often underfunded or deprioritized compared to immediate operational needs. | Start small with scalable pilots that demonstrate ROI and secure executive sponsorship to sustain investment. |
| Time Pressures: Rushed retirements capture checklists but miss critical tacit knowledge and insights. | Integrate ongoing knowledge capture into workflows before retirements, not just at exit interviews. |
While the table highlights immediate challenges and corresponding solutions, organizations benefit from a deeper set of strategies that address both near-term risks and long-term sustainability. The following sections expand on these themes, outlining actionable approaches that help organizations capture critical knowledge today, while laying the foundation for resilient succession planning tomorrow.
Near-term Strategies: Mitigating Immediate Risk
Engage Employees in Knowledge Capture Efforts
Long-tenured employees approaching retirement have accumulated invaluable institutional knowledge, and their sustained tenure itself demonstrates their consistent value to the organization. When a retirement cliff is looming, organizations should take action to engage those employees in efforts that help to capture and transfer key institutional knowledge before it is lost.
Cast a Wide, Inclusive Net
Organizations often lack visibility into actual retirement timelines. Rather than making assumptions about who might retire or inadvertently pressuring employees to reveal their plans, frame knowledge transfer efforts as part of comprehensive KM practices. By positioning these initiatives as valuable for all long-tenured employees—not just potential retirees—organizations create an inclusive environment that captures critical knowledge. This broader approach not only prepares for potential retirement-related knowledge gaps but also establishes ongoing knowledge transfer as a standard organizational practice.
Acknowledge and Thank Employees
Explicitly acknowledge the expertise and contributions of key knowledge holders participating in efforts. By recognizing their professional legacy and expressing the organization’s desire to preserve and share their wisdom with others, leaders can create a foundation for meaningful participation in knowledge transfer activities. This approach validates key members’ career impact while positioning them as mentors and knowledge stewards for the next generation. Consider setting aside some time from their normal responsibilities to encourage participation.
Reward Knowledge Sharing
Employees are far more likely to engage in knowledge transfer when it is seen as both valuable and valued. In EK’s experience, organizations that successfully foster a culture of knowledge sharing often embed these behaviors into their core talent practices, such as performance evaluations and internal recognition programs. For example, EK has helped to incorporate KM contributions into annual review processes or introduce peer-nominated awards like “Knowledge Champion” to highlight and celebrate individuals who model strong knowledge-sharing behaviors.
Enable Employees to Capture Knowledge
Effective knowledge transfer begins with capturing critical institutional knowledge. This includes both explicit knowledge, such as processes and workflows, and tacit knowledge, such as decision-making frameworks, strategic insights, and the rationale behind past choices. To guide organizations in successful knowledge capture and transfer practices, EK recommends implementing a variety of strategies that help build confidence and make the process manageable.
Provide Documentation Training and Support
Organizations should consider offering dedicated support through roles and teams that naturally align with KM efforts, such as technical documentation, organizational learning and development, or quality assurance. These groups can help introduce employees to the practice and facilitate more effective capture. For example, many organizations focus solely on documenting step-by-step processes, overlooking the tacit knowledge that explains the “why” behind key decisions to provide future employees with critical context. In EK’s experience, preserving and transmitting knowledge of past actions and opinions has given teams the confidence to make more informed decisions and ensure coherence in guidance. This approach is especially valuable from a legal perspective, where understanding the rationale behind decisions is crucial for consistency and compliance.
Help Prioritize the Knowledge to Capture
Organizations can help focus knowledge capture efforts, without overwhelming employees, by prioritizing the types of knowledge to capture. If knowledge falls into one of these categories, it is ideal to prioritize:
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- Mission-Critical Knowledge – High-impact expertise that is not widely known (e.g., decision-making rationales, specialized processes) is at greatest risk for loss. Encourage employees to prioritize this knowledge first.
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- Operational Knowledge – Day-to-day processes that can be captured progressively over time. Suggest to employees that they take advantage of workflows and cycles as they are completed to document knowledge in real time from beginning to end.
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- Contextual Knowledge – Broader insights from specific projects and initiatives are best captured in collective discussions or team reflections from various participants. Aim to make arrangements to put team members in conversation with one another and capture insights.
Embed Knowledge Capture into Workflows
Rather than treating documentation as a separate task, organizations should embed it into the existing processes and workflows where the knowledge is already being used. Integrating documentation creation and review into regular processes helps normalize knowledge capture as a routine part of work. In practice, this may look like employees updating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) during routine tasks, recording leadership reflections during key decisions, or incorporating “lessons learned” or retrospective activities into project cycles. Additionally, structured after-action reviews and reflective learning exercises can further strengthen this practice by documenting key takeaways from major projects and initiatives. Beyond improving project and knowledge transfer outcomes, these habits also build durable knowledge assets that support AI-readiness.
Design Succession-Focused Knowledge Sharing Programs
Cultural silos and resistance to sharing knowledge often undermine succession planning. Employees may hesitate to share what they know due to fears about losing job security, feeling undervalued, or simply lacking the time to do so. To overcome these challenges, organizations must implement intentional knowledge transfer programs, as outlined below, that aim to prevent a forthcoming retirement cliff from leaving large gaps.
Create Knowledge Transfer Interview Programs
Pairing long-tenured staff with successors ensures that critical institutional knowledge is passed on before key departures. Create thoughtful interview programming that takes the burden off the experienced staff from initiating or handling administrative efforts. EK recently partnered with a global automotive manufacturing company to design and facilitate structured knowledge capture and transfer plans for high-risk roles that were eligible for retirement, including walkthroughs of core responsibilities, stakeholder maps, decision-making criteria, and context around ongoing initiatives. These sessions were tracked and archived, enabling smoother transitions and reducing institutional memory loss. EK also supported a federal agency in implementing a leadership knowledge transfer interview series with retiring senior leaders to capture institutional knowledge and critical insights from their tenure. These conversations focused on navigating the agency’s operations, lessons for successors, and role-specific takeaways. EK distilled these into concise, topical summaries that were tagged for findability and reuse, laying the foundation for a repeatable, agency-wide approach to preserving institutional knowledge.
Foster Communities of Practice
Encourage cross-functional collaboration and socialize knowledge sharing across the organization by establishing communities of practice. The programs provide opportunities for employees to gather regularly and discuss a common professional interest, to learn from each other through sharing ideas, experiences, and best practices. Involve long-tenured staff in these efforts and encourage them to develop topics around their expertise. EK has seen firsthand how these practices promote ongoing knowledge exchange, helping employees stay connected and informed across departments, even during leadership transitions.
Offer Formal Knowledge Exchange Programs
Knowledge Exchange Programs, like job shadowing, expert-led cohorts, and mentorship initiatives, create clear pathways for employees to share and document expertise before transitions occur. Long-tenured employees are often excellent candidates to take the leading role in these efforts because of the vast knowledge they hold.
Ultimately, effective succession planning is not just about capturing what people know—it is about creating a culture where knowledge transfer is expected, supported, and celebrated. By addressing resistance and embedding knowledge-sharing into the rhythm of daily work, organizations can reduce risk, improve continuity, and build long-term resilience.
Long-term Strategies: Building Sustainable Knowledge Flow
While short-term efforts can help reduce immediate risk, organizations also need long-term strategies that embed knowledge management into daily operations and ensure continuity across future workforce transitions. That is why EK believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Knowledge Intelligence (KI) are essential tools in capturing, contextualizing, and preserving knowledge in a way that supports sustainable transitions and continuity.
Below are long-term, technology-enabled strategies that organizations can adopt to complement near-term efforts and future-proof institutional knowledge.
Structure and Contextualize Knowledge with a Semantic Foundation
EK sees contextual understanding as central to KM and succession planning, as adding business context to knowledge helps to illuminate and interpret meaning for users. By breaking down content into dynamic, structured components and enriching it with semantic metadata, organizations can preserve not only the knowledge itself, but also the meaning, rationale, and relationships behind it. EK has supported clients in building semantic layers and structured knowledge models that tag and categorize lessons learned, decisions made, and guidance provided, enabling content to be reused, assembled, and delivered at the point of need. This approach helps ensure continuity through leadership transitions, reduces duplication of effort, and allows institutional knowledge to evolve without losing its foundational context.
Leverage Knowledge Graphs and Intelligent Portals
Traditional knowledge repositories, while well-intentioned, often become static libraries that users struggle to navigate. EK has helped organizations move from these repositories to dynamic knowledge ecosystems by implementing knowledge graphs and a semantic layer. These approaches connect once disparate data, creating relationships between concepts, decisions, and people.
To leverage the power of the knowledge graph and semantic layer, EK has designed and deployed knowledge portals for several clients, providing a means for users to engage with the semantic layer. These portals consolidate information from multiple existing systems into a streamlined, user-friendly landing page. Each portal is designed to serve as a central hub for enterprise knowledge, connecting users to the right information, experts, and insights they need to do their jobs, while also supporting smoother transitions when staff move on or new team members step in. With intuitive navigation and contextualized search, the portal helps staff quickly find complete, relevant answers across multiple systems, explore related content, and access expertise—all within a single experience.
Augment Search and Discovery with Artificial Intelligence
To reduce the friction of finding and applying knowledge, EK has helped clients enhance knowledge portals with AI capabilities, integrating features like context-aware search, intelligent recommendations, and predictive content delivery. These features anticipate user intent, guide employees to relevant insights, and surface related content that might otherwise be missed. When paired with a strong semantic foundation, these enhancements transform a portal from a basic search tool into an intelligent instrument that supports real-time learning, decision-making, and collaboration across the enterprise.
Automate and Scale Tagging with AI-Assisted Curation
Manual tagging is often cited as one of the more time-consuming and inconsistent aspects of content management. To improve both the speed and quality of metadata, EK has helped clients implement AI-assisted tagging solutions that automatically classify content based on a shared taxonomy.
We recommend a human-in-the-loop model, where AI performs the initial tagging, and subject matter experts validate results to preserve nuance and apply expertise. This approach allows organizations to scale content organization efforts while maintaining accuracy and alignment.
For example, we partnered with a leading development bank to build an AI-powered knowledge platform that processed data from eight enterprise systems. Using a multilingual taxonomy of over 4,000 terms, the platform automatically tagged content and proactively delivered contextual content recommendations across the enterprise. The solution dramatically improved enterprise search, reduced time spent locating information, and earned recognition from leadership as one of the organization’s most impactful knowledge initiatives.
Integrate Technology, People, and Process Within Succession Planning
The most successful organizations do not treat knowledge technologies as standalone tools. Instead, they integrate them into broader KM and succession planning strategies, ensuring these solutions support, rather than replace, human collaboration and expertise.
In EK’s experience, when AI, knowledge graphs, and semantic metadata are used to enhance existing processes—like onboarding, leadership transitions, or project handovers—they become powerful enablers of continuity. These tools help protect institutional knowledge, reduce bottlenecks, and enable repeatable practices for knowledge transfer across roles, teams, and time.
As part of a long-term KM strategy, this allows organizations to evolve from reactive knowledge capture to proactive, ongoing knowledge flow.
Measuring Knowledge Transfer Impact
As we have provided the tools and advice for ensuring impactful knowledge captures and transfers, measuring the effectiveness of knowledge transfer initiatives is the essential next step to ensure that succession planning goals are being met and that knowledge transfer efforts are producing meaningful outcomes. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics can help track the success of these initiatives and provide insights into their impact on the organization’s leadership pipeline.
| Metric | Measurement Examples |
| Employee Engagement:One key indicator is active employee participation in knowledge transfer programs. This includes involvement in mentoring, workshops, job shadowing, and other formal knowledge-sharing activities. Tracking participation levels helps assess cultural adoption and provides insight into where additional encouragement or resources may be needed. |
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| Knowledge Retention:Capturing knowledge is only part of the equation. Ensuring it is understood and applied is equally important. By assessing how well successors are able to retain and use critical knowledge, organizations can confirm whether the transfer process is actually supporting operational continuity and decision quality. |
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| Transitioner Feedback:Understanding the perspective of new leaders or incoming staff can reveal valuable insights into what worked and what did not during a handoff. Their feedback can help organizations fine-tune interview guides, documentation practices, or onboarding resources for future transitions. |
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| Future Leader Readiness:Evaluating how prepared upcoming leaders are to step into key roles, both in terms of process knowledge and organizational culture, can serve as a long-term measure of success. |
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Closing
Navigating the retirement cliff requires both immediate action and long-term planning. By addressing resistance, dismantling silos, embedding knowledge-sharing into daily work, and leveraging technology, organizations can reduce risk, preserve critical expertise, and build long-term resilience. Need help developing a strategy that supports both near-term needs and long-term success? Let’s connect to explore tailored solutions for your organization.