Recession and knowledge management

Hate to say it, but we told you so. A lot of our clients and prospective clients have long fretted about the loss of talent as people reach retirement age. The point we've made to them time and again is that the decision to retire is often fluid...in the sense that a good stock market will accelerate retirement and a poor stock market will slow things down. And with the most recent debacle on Wall Street the later couldn't be any more true. Even the best laid retirement plans have been impacted by massive stock, bond and mutual fund losses.

Many of those same clients and prospects have delayed knowledge management efforts because workers had not been retiring quite as quickly as the workforce planning folks suggested they might (even before the recession)...and now they're off the hook considering the current economic environment.

But that entirely misses the point about knowledge capture and its potential impact on the business. People come and go, the wave of retirements is currently replaced by the wave of layoffs and RIFs. What institutional and job expertise is being lost and at what rate? Most importantly, as the economy improves and we start to rebuild our workforces...how much more quickly could new hires be brought up to speed, how much more could productivity be impacted and how much better positioned could your company be coming out of a downturn?