When NASA discovered that 60% of aerospace workers are slated to reach retirement age in the next few years, it needed to find a way to capture knowledge from exiting workers and make it available to remaining and future workers. "The concern is that the existing Apollo-era workers will take their knowledge with them," says Tom Cavanagh, a program manager at the Florida Space Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes academic and economic aerospace development initiatives and works with NASA on this problem.

NASA and Workforce Florida Inc., a workforce-development and policy group, turned to the institute to provide courses and programs that would facilitate intergenerational knowledge turnover for workers at the Kennedy Space Center. "We've also begun a mentoring program to hand the knowledge of one generation to another," Cavanagh says. "It's all about using E-learning and virtual collaboration to capture information so that it's retained online."

The mentoring program will include E-mail, threaded discussions, and live collaborative sessions using software from Centra Software Inc., which came bundled with the hosted University 360 E-learning portal from RWD Technologies Inc.

Another organization attempting to capture knowledge from an aging workforce is the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District. The agency is faced with rapid turnover as a large number of its employees reach retirement age. "BART is 30 years old, and a lot of the people who started the organization are still here," says Karen Arhontes, supervisor of technology-based training for BART. Twenty of 36 employees in the training department alone are approaching retirement age, Arhontes says.

To make sure that years of knowledge aren't lost, BART is using threaded-discussion software, C-image's document-management system, and Pathlore Inc.'s learning-management system. Pathlore's system stores training material and bulletins such as notices about procedural changes. The document-management system includes a knowledge-management repository, which BART plans to implement later this month, where employees preparing to depart can organize and store the information they keep on their PCs. The threaded-discussion component, which was developed in-house at BART using Lotus Notes, is used by employees to report how they solve problems and is accessible via an intranet.

The next step for BART's training department is to create online courses based on information gleaned from employees in the threaded discussions. "Right now, we're trying to use the technology and traditional methods of training," Arhontes says. "But once we get those practices together, we'll create online courses around them to distribute to employees."

Finding ways to capture the knowledge of retiring and other exiting workers is only one of the drivers behind the ongoing push in government agencies and business to better educate employees. Companies also combine knowledge-management and collaboration tools with E-learning and learning-management systems to gain or maintain a competitive edge. Sales of E-learning products, which were $2.4 billion last year, are expected to grow 40% to 50% a year, Gartner analyst James Lundy says. About 85% of companies are testing or using some sort of E-learning ware, Lundy says.

	Cutting course development time is a major goal for Verizon, Munzer says.

Telecommunications company Verizon Communications has been using E-learning to share employee knowledge for about three years. The Verizon training department, which includes an internal E-learning development group that's responsible for developing E-learning courses, relies on in-house experts to work with the development team to create training courses.

If Verizon is developing a course on how to properly install DSL, subject-matter experts explain how it's done to an instructional designer who programs the course, using simulations if the employee has to perform hands-on activity. Then the designer takes the content that's written in instructional-design format to three other companies and to an in-house group for bids, says Eli Munzer, Verizon's chief E-learning architect. Verizon outsources a lot of its E-learning work because its development needs often exceed the resources of the 10-person E-learning development group, Munzer says.

Photo by Gary Bogdon