Sabine Schultes on knowledge loss, knowledge transfer, and workplace safety when experts retire.
Every year, millions of experienced professionals retire – taking decades of irreplaceable expertise with them. Knowledge management has long ceased to be a pure HR concern; it is now a strategic challenge with measurable economic and safety-critical consequences.
Sabine Schultes is an international expert in hazardous goods and transport safety, and a lecturer in safety management at HTW Saar. In this issue of GOOD TO KNOW!, she addresses the silent erosion of institutional knowledge, the particular risks in safety-critical environments, and what organizations can do today to systematically preserve their experts’ know-how – before it disappears for good.
Research shows that losing a single experienced specialist can cost a company up to 2.5 times their annual salary. Structured knowledge transfer is the decisive lever for limiting these losses – and for maintaining workplace safety over the long term.