Generational Knowledge and Strategic Resilience: Mitigating Critical Knowledge Loss in High-Risk Industries

• High-reliability sectors such as oil and gas, nuclear energy, and aerospace depend
  on embedded, experience-based know-how to safeguard people, assets, and reputations.
• By 2028, however, over 40% of senior engineers will reach retirement eligibility, threatening to deplete tacit expertise.
• This MBA dissertation therefore asks: How can organisations mitigate critical knowledge loss without imposing unsustainable burdens on departing experts or over-engineering digital solutions?
• The study introduces and validates the Generational Knowledge Maturity Matrix (GKMM) (Figure 1), a strategic framework designed to assess an organisation’s capability in retaining, transferring, and activating critical knowledge across workforce generations. It spans five maturity levels across six key dimensions.
• The GKMM enables leadership teams to diagnose current maturity in preserving generational knowledge, prioritise interventions based on weakest dimensions, and benchmark progress annually as part of enterprise risk and capability reviews.
• Findings suggest that organisations below Level 3 of the GKMM face escalating safety and continuity risks, whereas Level-5 exemplars combine AI-enabled capture with mentoring cultures, executive stewardship, and cross-generational communities of practice.

Header image source: Created by Bruce Boyes with Microsoft Designer Image Creator.

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