Knowledge Transfer: A Practical Approach

By Calixto P. Anaya

Your companys Intellectual capital is the unique knowledge and skills your senior employees have gained through many years of experience. This intellectual capital will begin to dissipate as senior experienced employees retire or resign. The question you may want to ask is how can you capture, transfer, and preserve your companys intellectual capital before your senior experienced employees retire.

Today, many companies are implementing ways to capture and transfer the skills and knowledge gained by senior employees to younger employees. Without a process in place, younger employee will take longer to competently perform the job left vacant by the retiring experienced employees. Without adequate knowledge capture and transfer between employee generations, companies experience depletion in intellectual capital and knowledge assets.

This book describes a Knowledge Transfer (KT) Program that incorporates training and development strategies I have used throughout my professional career as an Instructional System Development (ISD) practitioner. The strategies embedded in the knowledge transfer program, when implemented as designed, will enable your company to transfer the knowledge & skills of your senior employees to the next generation of junior employees in four years. Once you achieve the KT Program goals, you can suspend the program if existing programs are able to maintain the achieved employee competence levels. If it is evident that existing programs will not be able to maintain the employee competence levels, I recommend that you integrate KT Program components describe in the book into existing programs.

The processes, procedures, and tools describe in this book have been proven to work through extensive use in actual knowledge transfer situations involving industrial and professional disciplines. The processes, procedures, and tools are highly user friendly, utilize current word processing technologies, and can be easily integrated into existing automated processes if so desired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479700851

Calixto P. Anaya

CALIXTO P. ANAYA with wife

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Calixto P. Anaya.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The information in this document is the exclusive property of Calixto P. Anaya.

Reproduction or any use of this material without the express written consent is strictly prohibited.

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1    Knowledge Transfer Program Design

Chapter 2    Demographics Study

Chapter 3    Competency Map (C-Map) Development

Chapter 4    Conducting EmployeeCompetency Survey

Chapter 5    Conducting Knowledge-Transfer Activities

Chapter 6    Knowledge Transfer for Professional Disciplines

Chapter 7    Report KT Program Progress

Foreword 

When faced with the dilemma of losing 35 percent of your organization’s most-experienced technical staff and ending up with a workforce where 60 percent of employees are under the age of thirty, all within a five-year time span, the question that most CEO’s might probably ask themselves is Who you going to call for answers and strategies?

Through first-hand practical experience, I can vouch for the strategies and tools described in this book as providing solutions for resolving issues associated with crew changes of these orders of magnitude. Whilst my personal experience of these strategies was in an organization with a large workforce with more than fifty thousand employees, I’m sure that the strategies detailed in this book are scalable to workforces of all sizes. I can confidently say this because we rolled out the implementation of the knowledge transfer program on a department-by-department basis.

Usually the aim of a knowledge transfer program is to put wise heads on young shoulders as quickly and effectively as possible. The process could perhaps be likened to changing the engine on an aircraft in midflight because normal operations are expected to continue without interruption despite the crew change. Whilst the arguments for adopting a knowledge transfer program are well founded in situations where there is a large crew change such as that described above, I would suggest that the principles are also applicable in situations of radical change in organizations, such as mergers and acquisitions, or dramatic changes to their product portfolio.

In this book, you will find a comprehensive step-by-step approach to bridging the knowledge gap between the departing crew and the on boarding crew, thereby retaining knowledge with your organization. The book adopts a sequential approach, starting with an explanation of the fundamentals of how to design a knowledge transfer program and the importance of understanding the workforce profile. Competency maps or C-Maps are explained in detail as they are a proven method of providing a baseline of knowledge that an employee is generally expected to possess in order to perform a job. Being able to assess an employee’s competency against their C-Map is the start of the knowledge-transfer process.

At the end of the day, the value of your knowledge transfer program will be determined by the value it provides your organization. It is important therefore that you are able to not only monitor how well you are progressing with the implementation but also the impact of your program at the workplace. To do this effectively, you’ll need to establish clear performance indicators with your stakeholders and agree on acceptable targets.

I have personally worked with the author and his team for several years while they perfected, through experiential practice, the strategies, methods, techniques, and tools detailed in this book.

I endorse the book as a valuable insight to anybody faced with the need to ensure that knowledge is adequately transferred whatever the situation.

Fouzi Abdulrahman Bubshait is currently the Senior HR Director with the leading mining company in Saudi Arabia. His career spans three decades and also includes various HR managerial positions in the oil and gas industry. He has a passion for the development of the next generation from the grass roots whilst they are still students at school. His interest in the development journey of young people is reflected in his role as chairman of the Quality of Academic Programs Sub-committee of the Industry —King Fahad University of Petroleum and Minerals Partnership.

Fouzi is the immediate past president of the Arabian Society for Human Resource Management (ASHRM). During his presidency, the membership of ASHRM increased from four hundred to four thousand, chapters were established throughout the GCC, some three hundred HR practitioners graduated from the ASHRM HR Master’s programs being delivered by Texas A&M University, and two highly successful conferences were held in Bahrain (2010) and Abu Dhabi (2012).

Fouzi’s academic qualifications include: a MSc. in HRM from Texas A&M University, a MSc. in HRD from the University of Minnesota, and a MSc. in Computer Science from King Fahad University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM).

Introduction 

It is becoming evident that companies across many regions of the world are experiencing an ever-increasing attrition rate of senior skilled employees. The most likely reason for this phenomenon is the pending retirement of the baby boomer generation, persons born between 1946 and 1964 according to the US Census Bureau. High attrition of senior employees, together with the influx of new employees, creates knowledge and skills (K&S) gap between these two populations of employees. Closing this knowledge and skills gap has become an important concern to many companies and government agencies.

This book describes a knowledge transfer (KT) program that incorporates training and development strategies I have used throughout my