Dr. Holly Baxter recently presented her paper, “Specialized Knowledge Transfer: Accelerating the Expertise Development Cycle” at the 2015 International Conference on Applied Human Factors & Ergonomics (AHFE) in Las Vegas. Her paper is now available on the Elsevier Science Direct Portal in the AHFE 2015 Proceedings (Volume 3), pages 1465–1472.
You can link to the full article here.
Paper Abstract:
One of the biggest challenges facing organizations is how to capture the knowledge of departing experts and transfer it effectively to their successors. Without effective knowledge transfer, valuable lessons learned and best practices are lost. This is especially difficult in two situations—at senior levels and with positions that are niche specialties. While many organizations have learned to capture tacit knowledge at lower levels, they still struggle transferring the senior-level and specialty knowledge into learning. This paper looks at a case study of more than 100 top-level executives, engineers, and scientists at Fortune 500 companies and military organizations. It outlines an effective process for enhancing knowledge transfer at the senior levels, including methods to capture tacit knowledge more effectively and empower leaders to retrieve that knowledge in a way that promotes effective learning. This paper also discusses the impact of levels of expertise on knowledge transfer. Best practices are identified for capturing specialty knowledge, analyzing and documenting key knowledge, and multiple methods to transfer knowledge both one-on-one and as larger scale training to accelerate the expertise development cycle.
