July-August 2018 NPJ

Knowledge Retention – The Challenge Ahead By Donald Hoffman, EXCEL Services Corporation. Donald Hoffman Mr. Hoffman founded EXCEL Services Corporation in 1985 to provide specialized professional services to nuclear entities in the US and globally. EXCEL is recognized as the worldwide leader in enhancing safety, improving performance and reducing costs of operations. Mr. Hoffman is a Fellow and Past President of the American Nuclear Society. Prior to starting EXCEL, Mr. Hoffman served as an Engineering Officer and Reactor Operator in the US Nuclear Submarine Navy and as the Licensing Manager at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In the nuclear industry we face challenges every day. That’s one of the many appealing aspects of our work: we identify and fix problems. As if we didn’t have enough hurdles, we’re facing yet another challenge and it’s not one we have been particularly trained to overcome – our aging workforce and the potential loss of knowledge associated with an ever-increasing rate of retirement among our most seasoned and experienced professionals. This crisis is expected to intensify as waves of baby boomers retire and fewer workers are available to replace them. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of American workers age 65 and over is expected to increase by 75 percent by the year 2050 while those 25 to 54 will likely increase only two percent. These statistics are even more true in the nuclear industry. As a result of this phenomenon, retaining “institutional knowledge” is critical if companies in our industry want to ensure they have the skills they need to succeed. Simply put, now is the time to address this problem and to develop a strategy that protects our industry against knowledge loss. The nuclear industry’s future as an energy source, and the country’s future energy policy, is at stake. EXCEL Services Corporation (EXCEL) is uniquely qualified to address this challenge and offer practical solutions. For nearly 35 years, our business model has been to seek the most highly skilled and knowledgeable individuals for specific tasks, tapping into their unique abilities developed over lifetimes of service. In other words, knowledge retention and transfer are what make us successful. I’d like to share with you our general suggestions on how to address this challenge. There are two possible approaches. One approach develops a program to retain knowledge within an organization by working with seasoned, but soon to retire staff, passing their knowledge on to more youthful employees. The second approach seeks sources of knowledge outside of the organization due to cost and personnel limitations associated with the first approach. In this article we address the first approach: how knowledge retention can work within a company. Naturally, the goal of a knowledge retention program is to establish an accelerated method of transferring the expertise of experienced personnel who are near retirement to knowledgeable but less experienced staff. The latter should exit the program having acquired knowledge and experience of veteran personnel through an accelerated program of knowledge retention and transfer that fits within the flow of performing regular work tasks. It is important to emphasize a delicate but important aspect of a program for inhouse retention of knowledge: that the knowledge retention work must be accomplished without an unacceptable disruption of the work the company needs to perform in order to succeed. A thoughtful manager recognizes that those upon whom the company relies on to exchange useful knowledge may already be looking forward to retirement and will be performing at their usual high standard of achievement, but not necessarily be seeking additional tasks. A related challenge for the manager is to develop within the less seasoned staff an understanding that the accelerated knowledge transfer is for their own good, rather than a burden. Learning, like teaching, can feel like an additional task, but in fact is an opportunity for professional development. The key is to further develop the employees’ sense of pride – the senior can be gratified through the role as mentor and the junior with having been selected as the recipient of the knowledge developed over a lifetime. The in-house accelerated knowledge retention program usually consists of three stages. The goal of the first stage is to gain input to ensure proper focus and planning of the knowledge retention program. The second stage primarily focuses on the knowledge acquisition and capture from the highly experienced individuals. The third stage focuses on the transfer of knowledge to individuals and groups in the organization. Clearly, the processes of learning and communication 30 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August 2018