What is knowledge transfer?

Knowledge transfer is the process of passing knowledge, skills and experience from one person or group to another inside an organization, so work can continue when people change roles, leave or retire. It covers both explicit knowledge that can be written down and tacit knowledge that lives in people's experience.

Reviewed by Clark Quinn, Chief Learning Strategist Updated October 28, 2026

Example

A water utility’s most experienced control room engineer plans to retire in nine months. She has handled every major outage for twenty years, and much of what she knows about the older pumping stations is not in any manual.

Her manager and the L&D team draw up a knowledge transfer plan. They list the situations only she has handled, schedule recorded interviews about each one, and pair her with two successors who first shadow her shifts and then run the control room while she watches. The interviews are written up as procedures and short training videos, so what she knows reaches future hires as well as the two successors.

How it works

Tacit and explicit knowledge

Knowledge transfer deals with two kinds of knowledge. Explicit knowledge is already documented or easy to document: procedures, system settings, policies, contact lists. Tacit knowledge comes from experience: judgment, rules of thumb, and knowing which warning signs matter and which can wait. Explicit knowledge is easy to hand over. Tacit knowledge is where most of the effort goes, because it leaves with the person if nobody captures it.

The steps

1. Identify the critical knowledge. Decide which roles and people hold knowledge that would be hard to replace. Common triggers are a retirement, a resignation, an internal move, a reorganization or the end of a project.
2. Capture it. Interview the expert, observe them at work and ask them to talk through real cases and decisions, not only the official process.
3. Structure and check it. Turn the raw material into documents, SOPs and checklists. The expert and their peers review it for gaps and errors.
4. Transfer it. Successors learn through shadowing, mentoring, supervised practice and training content.
5. Confirm it. The successor performs the work on their own, and the remaining gaps are filled while the expert is still available.

How to capture tacit knowledge

Asking an expert to “write down everything you know” rarely works, because they do not notice most of what they know. Approaches that work better:

• Ask about specific cases. “Tell me about the last time the system failed at night” brings out detail that general questions miss.
• Ask what newcomers get wrong. Experts usually remember the mistakes they have corrected, and each one points to a piece of tacit knowledge.
• Watch and ask. Observe the expert at work and ask why they did each thing, especially when they skip or change a documented step.
• Compare experts. Where two experienced people do the same task differently, the difference is worth discussing and writing down.

Knowledge transfer methods

• Shadowing and mentoring. The successor works alongside the expert. This is the best way to pass on tacit knowledge, but it is slow and reaches one person at a time.
• Expert interviews. Structured conversations about decisions, exceptions and past incidents bring out knowledge the expert would not think to write down.
• Documentation. SOPs, handover notes and process maps keep explicit knowledge available after the expert leaves.
• Communities of practice. Groups of people in similar roles who meet regularly to share problems and solutions.
• Training content. Turning captured knowledge into courses or training videos lets it reach everyone in the role, including people hired years later.

Common challenges

• Experts have little time. The people with the most knowledge are usually the busiest, and interviews keep slipping down their list.
• Experts do not know what they know. Tacit knowledge feels obvious to the person who has it, so they skip it unless asked about specific cases.
• Starting too late. A notice period of a few weeks is rarely enough to hand over years of experience.
• Captured but never used. Interview notes that sit in a shared drive do not change how successors work. Knowledge needs to end up in the materials people actually learn from, such as employee onboarding content.

Why it matters for L&D teams

• Retirement and turnover risk. When experienced staff leave, undocumented knowledge leaves with them, and the gap often shows only when something goes wrong.
• Better source material. Expert knowledge makes training match how the work is done on the ground, including the exceptions the official procedure leaves out.
• Faster ramp-up. Successors and new hires reach full performance sooner when they learn from captured expertise instead of rediscovering it.
• Reach beyond one successor. Turning one expert’s knowledge into documents and training lets it reach everyone who does the job.