I am a Staff Learning and Development Specialist at a state university. About 40% of the current university staff employees are nearing retirement within the next five years. We are concerned about the institutional knowledge that may evaporate when many retire. I'd like to hear what other organizations are doing to contain this wealth of knowledge. What resources or strategies are being used? Is anyone using a "job book" strategy?
Thanks for your valuable thoughts and ideas!

...or maybe it will be good to get some new, fresh blood and ideas and lose all of that old stuff?

...just another way to look at it.

Apprenticeship. The new resources "learn" from the masters.

Of course, they can, once they learn the "tried and true" staples and the "tricks of the trade"- they enhance it with their current knowledge and experiences and bring it to a new level.

Repeat as needed.

Hi there ... haven't visited the ASTD boards in a while, so I just saw your post.

What you describe is a trend that is affecting many large organizations today ... the boomers are retiring.

I consult with GM, and in additional to traditional talent management and succession planning, they are also trying to get the boomers engaged in web 2.0 activities like blogging and having 'personal pages'. The purpose is to capture their knowledge (content), knowledge of the organization (who to contact for what) and so on. As you know, once a person develops a personal page and actually blogs, it still takes time to fully develop. Also, this generation is not necessarily comfortable with the openness of web 2.0, blogs, etc, so that is a hurdle as well. The usual methods of engaging the opinion leaders in the organization, top executives, etc. goes a long way.

Food for thought! Good luck!

I've got a couple of suggestions:

1. Job aids become critical for the replacements. So it's important to start working on those now--while the SME's are available.

2. HR needs to identify critical competencies for each position (assuming that they aren't faculty roles--which can shift depending upon the Dept. Chair's preferences).

3. Don't assume that just become someone leaves, critical "corporate memory" or "know-how" is lost. If a 60 year old leaves but there are still 2 peers remaining who did the same work with similar competency, you just lost a good employee, not critical knowledge on how things work. OTOH, if the entire Student Housing staff is going to retire in mass, than you've got problems. So identify who is retiring and where. Identify what knowledge matters (for instance, how to keep the internal network going, how the school interacts with the state aid and loan program) that is at risk here. If all you're trying to do is capture whatever the aging workers know, than you've got an impossible task and will produce a hodge-podge of data (recipes for making killer soda-bread, the name of a really good bookie, which coke machines steal your change--all knowledge but not stuff I'd say is critical for organizational success).

4. Succession matters. You don't need someone in the pipeline for every departing person. But given what you need to do in #3 (identify who is leaving and where), you will be able to identify which jobs it's realistic to look inside for (ie: grow a replacement) vs. hire outside. For instance, most faculty spots can be filled from the outside. So start prepping those who are potentials.

5. Build in some flex systems. A little cross-training resources set up. Loan/co-op/internship programs, especially if you're a public institution (and can "borrow" people from other govt. offices or other state schools). Get those processes ironed out. Because if a lot of people leave in mass, it's going to be a handful.

And do recognize that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. You will not be losing corporate memory with some of these folks. And in other instances, losing corporate memory enables some change for the better.