The Zip File

I was working in Learning & Development. One of the most senior employees of the organisation was running the major part of out induction. He decided to retire. He sent me a zip file with all his material in it. I found it very hard to make sense of it. We did a "handover" in one telephone conversation but I still never really understood it.

No Face to Face Handover

My former company lost five key employees within three months in the same work area. When they finally decided to do an audit of this area of the business, they found that out of a team of six people, only the most senior person was still there. They said “Oh bugger, we knew this was going to happen”. Each person who had left had drawn up job handover and knowledge transfer plans, but their replacements hadn’t been there for direct training. So we had to get three of them back on short term contracts to train their successors.

Knowledge sharing is two way

I just changed job scope, and the colleague who handled that before me shared her experience with me. Knowledge sharing is a 2-way thing. Experienced colleagues can’t recall everything so you have to ask them questions to jolt their memory.

Dropped in the deep end

When a staff resigns, the new staff taking over is not briefed on job and yet expected to start work immediately. So the new person has to seek help all over the place.

Starting from zero each time

We handle different projects. Sometimes we rotate projects but the end users remain the same. When projects are passed on to new people, we don’t usually have chance to pass on knowledge, so they have to learn from scratch.