When Experience Walks Out the Door: Confronting the Generational Knowledge Crisis in High-Risk Industries

By: Jordan Richards and Zoltan Pasztory

In industries where precision matters - such as nuclear energy, offshore drilling, aviation, and infrastructure- minor missteps can lead to significant operational consequences.  Yet a growing issue remains largely under-addressed across Managing Directors' Committees, boardrooms, and control rooms: the departure of seasoned professionals and the loss of the institutional knowledge they carry with them.  This is a serious issue for Business and operational efficiency.

What happens when your most trusted engineer retires and no one remembers why a specific safety protocol was implemented and poorly described?

This is not a hypothetical situation.  It reflects the ongoing reality in sectors where a gap in memory or an overlooked detail can result in operational delays, near-miss incidents, or compliance failures.  While many organisations invest in system upgrades and regulatory alignment, far fewer have established consistent strategies to capture and retain the experience that underpins their operations.

As Personnel Today notes, “Mature workers play a vital role in talent retention and are instrumental in inspiring and educating the next generation.”

The Core Problem: Knowledge Loss Is Cumulative and Costly

Many companies acknowledge the growing wave of retirements.  However, it is not simply about workforce or headcount; it is about the experience, expertise, and skills that remain undocumented.  It is the engineer who understands the unspoken rationale behind an equipment configuration.  The lead operator who instinctively senses when something is off, even when the data appears normal.  The safety officer has decades of pattern recognition built into their decision-making process.

Research published in the Journal of Knowledge Management found that over 80% of high-risk industry leaders see workforce aging as a major operational risk—yet fewer than half have formal plans to mitigate it.

When this knowledge leaves the organisation, it is rarely replaced with equal value.  In many cases, the path to reacquiring it - if possible at all - is slow, expensive, and accompanied by significant risk, impacting the bottom line 

Knowledge Retention Must Become a Strategic Priority

While knowledge management is not a new concept, it has often been treated as a support function.  However, in today's operational climate, it must be viewed as a strategic asset and an integral part of a risk management strategy.  This is particularly true in high-risk sectors, where organisational memory directly influences safety and performance.

Here is a practical, people-first approach:

• Start with individuals, not software.  People - Process - then technology.  Identify key personnel who hold deep operational knowledge, particularly those nearing retirement or project transitions.

• Capture context alongside content.  Context is king!  Asking the right question leads to quality.  Documentation alone is not sufficient.  Interviews, mentoring sessions, and narrative debriefs can reveal decision rationales, workarounds, and site-specific nuances.

• Connect generations actively.  Establish Communities Of Practice, Professional associations, and knowledge domains where experienced professionals can coach, answer questions, and transfer knowledge in real time.

• Make knowledge accessible and applicable.  Make knowledge accessible and applicable.  Lessons learned should be easily searchable and available across teams - not buried in archived reports or outdated platforms.

Figure 1: A structured pathway for organisations to evolve from ad-hoc, reactive knowledge management to fully self-aware, strategic knowledge resilience.

What Practical Solutions Look Like

For example, in the oil and gas industry upstream environment, Senior engineers approaching retirement were invited to create digital profiles (i.e., a digital twin ) capturing both their technical knowledge and the reasoning behind past decisions.  When junior staff faced similar challenges, they were able to consult those profiles and apply the insights they had learned rather than start from scratch.  This doesn't replace the person or the pathway to the expertise, but does allow a path to the person.  First, check to see if the problem has been solved elsewhere by using the Digital twin, and then, if needed, reach out to the designated Subject Matter Expert.

Studies on Communities of Practice show people are five times more likely to turn to a colleague than to a formal source when solving a problem - saving time and reducing costly errors.

In another case, a safety officer used a live Lessons Learned module during an operation to prevent a repeat equipment failure.  By applying institutional memory in real time, the organisation avoided costly downtime and reinforced the value of active knowledge management.

At Tacitous and NKM4You, we have implemented Critical Knowledge Retention (CKR) strategies in partnership with Subject Matter Experts.  These systems combine digital collaboration tools with human-centered knowledge transfer, turning one-time insights into organisational assets that evolve with time.

More Than Data: Building a Culture of Knowledge Continuity

Organisations that value generational knowledge foster workplaces where people feel respected, understood, and heard.  Your retirees become mentors, not just afterthoughts and a gold watch.  Knowledge and expertise are reframed as a living process rather than a static document.  

Studies on Communities of Practice show people are five times more likely to turn to a colleague than to a formal source when solving a problem—saving time and reducing costly errors.

These values not only preserve organisational expertise but also enhance operational resilience and leadership confidence.

If you operate in a high-reliability sector and have not yet addressed your organisation's approach to generational knowledge retention, now is the time to begin.  Waiting until after the subsequent retirement or incident is too late.

Author Contacts and Resources
Jordan Richards, Technologist: https://www.tacitous.com
contactus@tacitous.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanrichards/ 

Zoltan Pasztory, Knowledge Management Consultant (Nuclear)
office@nkm4you.com  https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoltan-pasztory-ba526034/