Companies risk losing critical expertise when tacit knowledge walks out the door with departing employees.

Mentorship, job rotation, and storytelling help convert hidden expertise into shared organizational value.

Leaders who reward knowledge-sharing build cultures that drive innovation and long-term resilience.

I recall the first full-time job I ever had. I was a young graduate joining Alcan, an aluminium company that made commercial aluminium windows and doors for the architectural building industry. I recall my mentor, a very nice elderly man who had amazing technical knowledge, but I found he was reluctant to share his accumulation of lifelong knowledge with me.

This highlights a problem many organizations face today: How do you capture and retain the tacit knowledge that is unwritten, unspoken, and intuitive, which individuals acquire through personal experiences, interactions, and observations (Polanyi, 1966; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995)? Unlike explicit knowledge, which is well-documented, codified, and transferred through books, manuals, and databases, tacit knowledge resides within individuals and is difficult to articulate; it includes skills, expertise, and insights gained over time (Polanyi, 1966).

Significant competitive advantage can be gained in capturing and leveraging tacit knowledge (Grant, 1996; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). However, due to the intangible nature of tacit knowledge, transferring and retaining this knowledge pose considerable challenges (Szulanski, 1996). Many employees have valuable insights that are not formally documented, making it crucial for organizations to develop strategies to extract, share, and institutionalize this knowledge before it is lost due to employee retirement or turnover (DeLong, 2004).

Mentorships and apprenticeship programs are very effective ways to capture tacit knowledge (Swap et al., 2001). Being structured, this enables experienced........

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