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Working and ageing
112 Guidance and counselling for mature learners

knowledge management challenge (Stam, 2010). Because more workers will
be leaving the labour force, organisations will need to find ways to assure that
expert knowledge does not leave with them. However, not all knowledge is
critical, nor does it necessarily reside in one particular person. So deciding
what knowledge is critical, and then finding which employees have that
knowledge, needs to be the first consideration when developing a knowledge
retention strategy. Another consideration is that one must understand how
knowledge is approached in the organisation; is it a good that can be
packaged and transferred, or is it more fluid and depends on who has it and
who uses it? Corporate epistemologies thus play a major role in developing a
knowledge management strategy based on either codification or
personalisation (Hansen et al., 1999). This, in turn, has an effect on knowledge
transfer strategies.

6.3.1. Organisational policy issues
Like retention strategies, knowledge transfer strategies are developed in line
with corporate epistemologies; they as well are contingent on how knowledge
is understood within the organisation as well. Basically, if an organisation
understands knowledge to be a packageable good, then transfer strategies
will be focused on codification and storing of expert knowledge in systems
such as databases, content-management systems, and libraries. However,
organisations that understand knowledge to be inextricably woven into
expertise typically choose strategies that rely on personalisation, or bringing
people together. Depending on the corporate epistemology, different ways of
explicating critical tacit knowledge are used. In the case of the older worker,
who is usually considered to have a great store of this critical knowledge,
organisations will be challenged to understand how complex, expert
knowledge is explicated and subsequently transferred.

6.3.2. Research possibilities
Thus, from a knowledge management perspective, the relationship a worker
has with the organisation also considers how knowledge is retained and
transferred.
This section uses this idea as a basis for developing specific research
possibilities that can be developed to contribute to our understanding of
intergenerational learning: there are strong links between learning, knowledge
transfer and retention and organisational development.
There are four emergent possibilities for research on this second theme,
nearly identical to those in theme one, except that guidance models play a