Within modern businesses, keeping valuable information about the organization processes and employees’ experiences is vital for companies that want to sustain the quality of their services and products. However, there is a possibility when some workers depart from the organization or a team is disbanded so that their knowledge might be lost with their absence. To preserve the information, various knowledge transfer methods and tools are used by companies. In the essay, formal education and training, mentoring, communities of practice, wikis, and challenges via inquiry are described.
Methods of Knowledge Transfer
One of the most popular and well-established methods of knowledge transfer is formal education and training. For the purpose of disseminating the knowledge, organizations create training departments where people design specific tools for gathering information and then shape the learning programs for future employees (Training Industry, 2020). The method is applicable for workers with beginner experience who should be guided through learning to acquire essential skills.
Next, mentoring is used to transfer knowledge directly from one person, an expert in a field, to the other. In this way, new employees or team members have limited access to the source of knowledge and can inquire about it for deeper understanding. However, there is a difficulty with communication that can prevent employees from effective mentoring, so some strategies should be applied (DeLong, 2019). As a result, the method suits beginner and practitioner workers.
The other essential and widespread method of knowledge transfer is communities of practice. The central idea of the method is mutual knowledge sharing between the workers of one company who have voluntarily decided to participate in the practice (Hajric, n.d.). Then, knowledge is transmitted from person to person so that a group of people obtains it instead of just one individual. Thus, the method is used for creating a joint knowledge base for some practice.
The following method, wikis, is relatively new since its use presupposes the application of technologies. Precisely, wikis are concise instructions for how to manage some matters that are constructed as a network of related articles. In the context of organizations, wikis are created by employees for their coworkers within local networks (Lisitski, n.d.). Wikis help share and transmit knowledge of employees that cannot personally communicate information or for knowledge that should be in written form.
Finally, challenges via inquiry are often used in the fields that need high specialization of its workers. Namely, the procedure suggests that workers would discuss their practice and face some issues in the process, which they later investigate (Burchill, 2019). The approach is valuable due to the fact that the employees can discover the areas where knowledge transfer is the most necessary and fulfill their gaps after that.
The Application of Knowledge Transfer Methods
The information discussed earlier is essential for deciding what method to use when my project team is disbanded. As such, the most practical step before organizing the knowledge transfer process is to “identify the knowledge that you need to gather” (Maestro, 2021, para. 17). For my project team, there is information that should be easily accessed afterward, so that it would be helpful to have it digitalized; for this purpose, wikis are the most appropriate. Moreover, there are multiple members of the team that should transmit their knowledge; then, communities for practice are also suitable. Therefore, it would be adequate to use both methods for creating a network of instructions and using shared knowledge.
References
Burchill, J. (2019). Inquiry-based learning: Challenges for science teachers. Web.
DeLong, D. (2019). How to improve knowledge transfer: 3 mentoring tactics that matter most. Web.
Hajric, E. (n.d.). Communities of practice. Web.
Lisitski, D. (n.d.). How wikis are transforming knowledge management. Web.
Maestro. (2021). How to effectively complete a knowledge transfer plan. Web.
Training Industry. (2020). Knowledge transfer. Web.