My mother retired years after her 65th birthday. When she did, she took with her well over 30 years of knowledge on the "Proper Way To Get Things Done" - techniques that were a combination of job knowledge and the relationships she had built with vendors and with her coworkers. I'm significantly biased, but those were some pretty big shoes to fill.

A lot has been said about organizational brain drain over the past few years, and a lot of the focus has been on the Baby Boomer generation retiring.  Here's an interesting realization: brain drain doesn't just occur when the Baby Boomers leave -  it occurs when any employee leaves, especially with the rapidity that knowledge is created and altered in today's work environment. When the average length of time an employee holds a job these days is between 2 to 5 years, and as technology and networks shift just as swiftly, organizations need to place a priority on capturing and maintaining all their intellectual capital.

Consider this: what would happen to your department's workflow if your LMS Administrator were to leave?  Or your Training Coordinator?  Let's say only one person on your team is able to facilitate a course -- what happens then that person leaves (our Total Trainer design team can serve as a case study for this last "what if").  These people might be retiring Boomers, but they just as easily can be Gen X'ers or Millenials seeking a different challenge.

Intellectual capital is not limited to one generation, and its importance is not limited to those employees with significant tenure.  While presentations such as Devon Scheef's May 27 Learning Event may be couched as a preventative for the loss of legacy expertise, it would behoove all of us to consider applying her approaches with the mindset that each employee is host to a unique bit of wisdom critical to the operation of the company, and to find a way to build a community that embraces the ready sharing of that wisdom.