Steve Trautman’s Five Step Knowledge Transfer Process

Steve Trautman, talent risk management and knowledge transfer expert, has some great information around making sure your more experienced employees are transferring knowledge to the up-and-coming members of your workforce. Follow Steve’s five-step process to help keep critical skills and knowledge in house, even as employees retire or move on.
July 18, 2018 | Manufacturer
By: Michael S.
I have over 40 years experience in a broad range of manufacturing areas. Starting with an apprenticeship in Germany I’ve worked my way through a variety of positions within the manufacturing field. I got my start as a Tool and Die maker. I next became a supervisor of a class A tool room, then manager of a machining department. I was exposed to lean manufacturing in the mid 90s and adapted the lean philosophy. Loving and teaching the lean approach, I moved on to become a Continuous Improvement manager which led to a job as a manufacturing manager. I joined Acuity in 2015 as their manufacturing expert. I hope to evolve how manufacturers deal with and think about insurance companies, as well as be a resource to my fellow employees – enabling them to better understand the unique needs of manufacturers.

Steve Trautman, talent risk management and knowledge transfer expert, has some great information around making sure your more experienced employees are transferring knowledge to the up-and-coming members of your workforce. Follow Steve’s five-step process to help keep critical skills and knowledge in house, even as employees retire or move on.

 

Question: How can the baby boomer generation transfer knowledge to millennials?

Really, what we should try to do is to get millennials to extract information from boomers. Millennials want to grow into important roles and do important work. They’ll likely be in this industry, if not in this role, 3 to 10 years from now. So, let’s give millennials a process for getting the information they need to succeed at their work. Here’s the process I recommend:

 

  1. Be sure new employees have a clear idea of who they need and want to learn from. 

  2. Clarify what you want experts to teach their younger, less experienced colleagues. Don’t make them guess, and don’t ask for a “complete download.” That is not fair to either the boomer or the millennial learner.

  3. Make it part of a new hire’s job to learn from an expert. If you put them in charge of learning, they’ll make time for it.

  4. Make sure there are tools and processes in place to transfer knowledge—especially technical knowledge. Provide a simple and clear way to deconstruct their expertise, teach it, and then test to ensure it has been learned. 

  5. Protect one hour a day of an expert’s time for knowledge transfer.

 

A simple process like this will ensure that even when generational differences and technology preferences exist, successful knowledge transfer is possible. If you want to dig deeper into this knowledge transfer process, you can read more about it here.

By: Michael S.
I have over 40 years experience in a broad range of manufacturing areas. Starting with an apprenticeship in Germany I’ve worked my way through a variety of positions within the manufacturing field. I got my start as a Tool and Die maker. I next became a supervisor of a class A tool room, then manager of a machining department. I was exposed to lean manufacturing in the mid 90s and adapted the lean philosophy. Loving and teaching the lean approach, I moved on to become a Continuous Improvement manager which led to a job as a manufacturing manager. I joined Acuity in 2015 as their manufacturing expert. I hope to evolve how manufacturers deal with and think about insurance companies, as well as be a resource to my fellow employees – enabling them to better understand the unique needs of manufacturers.