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APQC’s ‘Great Retirement’ Findings: What Teams Can Do About Knowledge Loss

A wave of retirements is hitting industries worldwide - and with it, a flood of lost expertise. APQC’s latest research warns that over half of today’s workforce could exit within five years, taking decades of know-how with them. For AEC teams, the question isn’t if knowledge loss will happen, but how to prevent it before it’s too late.

10 Oct 2025

The “Great Retirement” is here – and it’s creating a serious knowledge gap. A new APQC survey found that, on average, organizations expect 51% of their workforce to retire or leave within five years, amplifying the risk of losing decades of know-how.

This looming wave of retirements has been dubbed a “Silver Tsunami.” By 2030, an estimated 61 million baby boomers will exit the workforce, taking with them hard-earned expertise and institutional memory. Leadership awareness of this issue is high – most executives recognize that critical knowledge is walking out the door – but recognition hasn’t translated into action.

APQC notes that while leaders acknowledge the threat, many organizations still lack consistent, programmatic practices to capture and transfer departing employees’ expertise.

Knowledge Capture From Departing Retirees – Frequency Distribution

Source: APQC, ‘The Great Retirement: Knowledge Loss, AI & The Workforce Shift’ (Aug 2025)

Leadership Knows the Risk, But Action Is Lagging

It’s encouraging that top managers understand knowledge loss is a serious problem, yet troubling that structured solutions remain rare. In APQC’s research, a majority of organizations admitted they do not have a formal knowledge retention program for soon-to-retire staff.

Often, knowledge transfer is handled ad-hoc – maybe a rushed handover or a few shadowing sessions – rather than through a sustained initiative. As one workforce expert observed,

Very few companies are taking a consistent and creative approach to addressing the issue of baby boomers leaving their organizations.

In many cases, vital know-how leaves on Friday along with the retiree, and the company is left scrambling on Monday to fill the void.

Clearly, leadership intent alone isn’t enough; organisations need to back it up with concrete processes and time investment to capture that wisdom before it walks out.

Irregular Knowledge Capture Leaves Gaps

A key finding from APQC’s “Great Retirement” survey is just how irregular and insufficient knowledge capture efforts currently are. An alarming 41% of organizations said they “rarely or never” even attempt to collect know-how from retiring employees. Even among those that do, it’s often inconsistent.

One common approach is an exit interview in a retiree’s final week – better than nothing, but far from adequate to download 30+ years of experience! The result is that much tacit knowledge (the tips, tricks, historical context, and unwritten lessons) simply evaporates. Newer employees are then forced to reinvent the wheel, spending time solving problems that their predecessors had already figured out.

In fact, one survey found 41% of employees have had to start a job essentially from scratch due to lack of knowledge transfer from their predecessors. These gaps in institutional memory lead to avoidable mistakes, delays in onboarding, and lost productivity – all because the insights of veteran staff were never captured for the next generation.

Time, Resources, and Culture Block Knowledge Transfer

Why aren’t more teams capturing retiring experts’ knowledge? APQC’s research points to a few familiar culprits.

Time is the top barrier – 52% of organizations say day-to-day deadlines leave little room for extra knowledge-sharing sessions. Busy project teams feel they can’t spare senior engineers for “knowledge capture” when there are immediate fires to fight.

Resource constraints are the second blocker (45% of firms). There may be no budget to backfill a veteran so they can overlap with their successor, or no staff dedicated to running a knowledge transfer program.

The third major challenge is culture – 35% of organizations admit their culture doesn’t encourage knowledge sharing, so efforts never take off. If people fear training their replacement or simply aren’t incentivised to document lessons learned, even the best-intentioned programs will stall.

As one industry expert put it, “Sharing of knowledge should be part of a company’s culture… Why reinvent the wheel if it has been done before? What worked and what didn’t needs to be shared.” A cultural mindset that values learning from the past is essential; otherwise, no one makes time for it and critical know-how stays locked in individuals’ heads.

Overcoming these barriers requires both leadership and tools. Leaders need to create time and reward mechanisms for knowledge capture – for example, baking it into project schedules or performance goals. They should also foster a supportive culture by recognising employees who mentor and document their expertise.

However, even with time and encouragement, teams need practical methods to actually preserve knowledge in usable form. This is where technology can play a pivotal role.

Turning Lost Knowledge into a Searchable Resource with Technology

One practical mitigation strategy is to leverage modern knowledge management tools to capture and organize what your veterans know. For instance, Tektome’s KnowledgeBuilder platform is designed to help AEC teams do exactly this.

It uses AI to transform decades of past project files – drawings, markups, reports, photos, and more – into a structured, searchable knowledge base. What used to sit buried in network folders can now be queried on demand. As we describe it,

what used to be buried in folders is now instantly searchable,

connecting past decisions to current challenges for “smarter design and fewer repeated mistakes.”

In practice, KnowledgeBuilder automatically extracts key information from your existing documents and stores it in a central repository. The next time your team faces a tricky design problem, you can simply search this repository in plain language to see how a similar issue was handled in the past. By mining the company’s own archives of projects, teams can avoid repeating past errors and reuse hard-earned lessons instead of starting from scratch.

While tools like this can’t replace face-to-face mentoring or storytelling, they significantly lighten the burden of knowledge capture. Rather than asking a retiring engineer to write a 50-page lessons learned document (which probably won’t happen), software can continuously gather insights from the work artifacts they’ve already produced over the years.

Taking Action: Stop the Brain Drain

APQC’s “Great Retirement” findings are a wake-up call: without intervention, organizations risk losing half their institutional knowledge in the next few years. The good news is that it’s not too late to act. By recognising the urgency (as many leaders already do) and moving from awareness to implementation, teams can turn potential knowledge loss into an opportunity for knowledge renewal.

Start by identifying the subject-matter experts in your ranks who are nearing retirement or likely to leave, and prioritize capturing their wisdom – whether through interviews, mentorship programs, or intelligent knowledge base tools (or better yet, all of the above). Encourage a culture where sharing know-how is valued, not an afterthought. And consider investing in AI-driven solutions like Tektome’s KnowledgeBuilder to institutionalise knowledge retention.

These systems ensure that even as individuals depart, their contributions remain – searchable, reusable, and continuously enriching those who come next.

 

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