Feature I
n the UK, 31% of workers are now over 50, and the state pension age keeps rising (Centre for Ageing Better, 2024).1 Experienced workers staying
longer sounds positive until you consider what happens to their expertise whilst they remain in post year after year. When someone stays in post for an additional decade beyond typical retirement age, critical knowledge becomes more embedded and difficult to extract. Systems, relationships, workarounds, and processes that exist solely in someone’s head don’t get easier to transfer with time. They become more entangled, more context-dependent, more challenging to document. Then that person retires, and we discover we’ve lost something we didn’t realise we had. This isn’t about how different
generations learn; research shows generational differences in work attitudes are “moderate to small, essentially zero in many cases” (Costanza et al., 2012).2
Decades of accumulated expertise that could transform our organisations if we capture and distribute it effectively
This is about
the practical reality that we’re facing one of the largest generational handovers in workplace history, and most organisations are unprepared. The question for us is straightforward:
what’s our role in preventing this skills implosion? We need to collaborate with knowledge management and talent management, and we’re uniquely positioned to drive this. We touch every part of the organisation, understand how learning happens, and have frameworks to capture and transfer expertise before it walks out the door.
What needs to change We need to abandon the fiction that knowledge transfer happens automatically. We should advocate for formal knowledge audits prioritising those who have been in the business
longest, identifying critical expertise and beginning structured capture programmes years before departure. You cannot write a manual about 25 years of domain-specific problem- solving. The evidence points towards social learning: communities of practice show positive effects in 91% of rigorous studies; formal mentoring programmes achieve 72% retention compared to 49% baseline (PLOS ONE, 2023; Mentorloop, 2024).3 We need formal roles that value knowledge transfer as work. Technical Fellow programmes reposition experienced employees into roles where their primary function is mentoring and problem-solving across teams, with compensation equivalent to senior management.
The progression problem The handover intersects with retention destructively. A one-year increase in average retirement age cuts promotions to management by nearly 50%, whilst 60% of UK workers cite lack of career prospects as their main reason for leaving (Go1, 2024; Major Players, 2024).4 We keep experienced workers in
roles longer, blocking progression. Younger workers leave because they can’t see a path forward. When experienced workers retire, we’ve lost both their expertise and the people who might have absorbed it. Our role is advocating for internal mobility
1. Centre for Ageing Better (2024) ‘Number of over 50s in UK workforce reaches record 10 million’. Available at:
https://ageing-better.org.uk/news/number-over-50s-uk-workforce-10-million
2. Costanza, D.P., Badger, J.M., Fraser, R.L., Severt, J.B. and Gade, P.A. (2012) ‘Generational Differences in Work- Related Attitudes: A Meta-analysis’, Journal of Business and Psychology, 27, pp. 375-394.
3. a) Mentorloop (2024) ‘Mentoring Statistics You Need to Know - 2025’. Available at:
https://mentorloop.com/blog/mentoring- statistics/ b) PLOS ONE (2023) ‘The aims and effectiveness of communities of practice in healthcare: A systematic review’, PLOS ONE, 18(10). Available at:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0292343 4. Go1 (2024) UK Workforce Survey. Cited in People Management (2024). Major Players (2024) Salary Census 2024.
programmes: lateral moves, project- based assignments, cross-functional rotations that build capability whilst experienced workers remain.
What can you start doing? Establish communities of practice around critical domains. Create action learning sets bringing together workers at different career stages. Design formal mentoring programmes with 12-month minimum durations and proper mentor training. Work with knowledge management
to conduct systematic audits identifying single points of failure. Experiment with short-form knowledge capture: brief videos where experts explain decision-making, podcast-style interviews exploring career-long lessons, written insights documenting approaches. Support networking events connecting experts with those who need their knowledge. The generation working longer
represents decades of accumulated expertise that could transform our organisations if we capture and distribute it effectively. Organisations that treat knowledge transfer as strategic work will come through this demographic shift stronger. Those that don’t will spend the next decade rebuilding knowledge they once had, but failed to preserve. n
Tom McDowall is the founder and Chief Learning Geek of Evolve L&D, where he helps L&D functions adopt agile, experiment- led ways of working.
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