One of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is how to capture the knowledge of departing experts and transfer that knowledge effectively to their successors or other parts of the organization. Without effective knowledge transfer, these valuable lessons learned and best practices are lost. This is especially difficult in two situations—at senior levels in organizations and with positions that are in niche specialties. The knowledge in each of these areas is so specialized that only a few people have the knowledge, yet it's knowledge essential to the organization. The tacit knowledge of an expert is difficult to capture and transfer effectively because it involves deeply-embedded skills that the expert may not even be consciously aware of using. While many organizations have learned to capture tacit knowledge at lower levels of the organization successfully, they still struggle with transferring the senior-level and specialty knowledge into learning.

This paper looks at a case study of more than 50 top-level executives, organizational leaders, engineers, and scientists at Fortune 500 companies and military organizations. It outlines an effective process for enhancing knowledge transfer at the senior levels of organizations, including methods to capture tacit knowledge more effectively and efficiently 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, challenges with transferring knowledge from experts to less experienced individuals, and why transferring knowledge from an expert directly to a novice usually results in failure. Best practices are identified for capturing key 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.