In the past, he says, people would take pictures of welding jobs, for example, to share with colleagues, but the photos were not shared effectively. Now, images as well as technical instructions are available online. Michel says employees use the repositories if they save time and are useful to them. To encourage experienced workers to add information to the databases, the company measures such efforts on performance reviews. Michel didn’t provide details on cost savings from the project, but says the initial investment paid for itself after one year by making up for the time workers used to spend trying to find the same information. Looking ahead, Michel says he hopes to motivate more workers to use the repositories by making the information available to them in the field on mobile devices.

Looking Ahead

At Northrop Grumman, times have changed since its massive downsizing in the 1990s. Although a large percentage of its workforce is nearing retirement, the average age of employees has dropped from the high 40s to the mid 40s in the past four years since the company started hiring more college grads. Shaffar says he is now working on balancing the more gradual transfer of knowledge from older to younger workers with the need to capture some crucial expertise quickly before it’s too late. For example, Northrop Grumman engineers who are competing on a proposal for a "crew exploration vehicle," which is being designed to replace the space shuttle and travel to the moon (and eventually to Mars), met in August with a group of retirees who worked on the Apollo program that sent men to the moon more than 35 years ago. Using a PC program called Quindi and a camera attached to a laptop, a facilitator recorded retirees telling stories about how they grappled with the technical problems of sending a man to the moon. These tales will be available as webpages for engineers working on this project. Shaffar acknowledges that employees would rather go to another person than a system for advice, but he says the exercise helped capture knowledge that otherwise soon would be gone.

Most important, Shaffar has learned that the problem goes beyond looking at what skills you have right now. "There have always been new generations, and we’re not any different in that way," he says. "Mentoring, training and passing on knowledge is not something you can do at the last minute. You have to plan ahead."