IntroductionWhenever a company has an employee who performs or has knowledge of a critical skill in your organization, the thought of their retirement or departure can be frightening. The amount of knowledge that could potentially be disclosed can be detrimental to any business that has not taken the time to develop protection for this essential skill set/knowledge. While you can't control what an employee chooses to do (i.e. retire or quit), you do control how much knowledge is left to someone else in the organization . By developing an unwritten knowledge retention program, you ensure that your business will continue to operate normally even after the employee(s) leave. What is knowledge? It is impossible for a company to retain every piece of knowledge it has ever owned. on top of that, it would also be a waste of time if the knowledge was not essential to the business. In order to determine what knowledge you want to protect against leaving the company, you must first understand the four types of knowledge as defined by David DeLong. First, there is human knowledge, also called explicit or tacit knowledge. This is called knowledge that allows a person to acquire a skill or expertise; it can be cognitive or sensitive. Tacit knowledge is often knowledge that has been obtained, but cannot be articulated or communicated to others. Often people don't even know they have it or are applying it to their work. This makes it extremely difficult to capture knowledge and pass it on to other people. Second, there is social knowledge, which arises from personal/professional relationships with individuals, usually from working in groups. This form o...... middle of paper ...... similar teams doing similar work. This method is also known to be what many companies consider their "best practices" because it involves learning how to complete the task more effectively and efficiently, and can lead to improvement throughout the organization . Shared knowledge is essentially common knowledge, but it is actually used to improve the business. Examples could be as simple as adopting a new form of technology to be more efficient, or as complex as adopting a new procedure. Once it works in one group, you can then pass the knowledge on to other similar groups to improve their effectiveness or efficiency as well. An important aspect of this method is that "the goal of quasi-transfer is not to share knowledge, but rather to achieve a specific business objective established by management" (Dixon, 2000).