Four Weeks and Four People

It’s a story that’s familiar to Human Resource professionals: a long-term, highly skilled employee departs the company, leaving their former department with a loss of hard-to-replace knowledge. Often called the “brain drain” when applied to the phenomenon of the baby boomers reaching retirement age, companies are now starting to proactively implement knowledge retention strategies to address this concern.

I have four more weeks before retirement. They've given up finding a replacement for me. Something about breaking the mold when they made me. So now the plan is to distribute my work to four, or five, or six ... others. Monday I'll start working with those folks passing on 33 years of experience and knowledge. As my friend Dan said, "I'm the history channel."

I'll leave them with 26 GBs of data and a smile.

Originally written on March 5, 2011.