What walks out the door when your experts do?
Structured SME interviews that capture what your most experienced people know. On the record while they're still here to share it.
A short call to pinpoint what's at risk and what capturing it takes. No obligation.
Institutional knowledge is unique to one person. When they leave, coworkers can't do 42% of that job.
(Panopto Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report)
Of the construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031.
(NCCER)
Manufacturing jobs are projected to go unfilled by 2030
(Deloitte & The Manufacturing Institute)
Employees say knowledge gained from hands-on experience is the hardest to replace once it's lost.
(Panopto)
Organizations that feel ready to preserve knowledge, despite 75% saying it's important to their success.
(Deloitte)
Who do your teams call when something breaks?
We've seen this (and solved it) for manufacturing and construction clients. But it's the same everywhere: decades of knowledge that was never documented, living in a handful of heads.
And one way or another, those people eventually leave. Retirement at least sends a save-the-date. Resignations give you two weeks. Restructures can give you no warning at all.
Quick test. If your three most experienced people gave notice this month, what would slow down, break down, or stop? If that makes you wince, you have a knowledge capture problem.
Most knowledge management covers what's written down.
The expensive gap is everything that isn't.
Couldn't you just record it yourself?
You could. The hard part is knowing what to ask.
Your experts spend their days doing the job and helping everyone else do theirs: answering questions, guiding the people around them. Do they have time to document it all? Do you? And decades of mastery become second nature, the hardest thing to write down about yourself.
Capturing knowledge well is its own skill. It's the same discipline our instructional designers use for eLearning: we start with the target outcomes and the audience, because both change what gets captured and how. In the sessions, we steer past rabbit holes and keep every conversation moving toward the source of truth.
Neovation Custom Learning has spent more than fifteen years drawing what experts know out of their heads and onto the record.
Knowledge capture done for you.
What you walk away with
Every knowledge capture engagement delivers three things. All yours to keep.
The full sessions, recorded.
Your experts' explanations, preserved in their own words.
A clean, searchable transcript.
Find any answer without rewatching hours of footage.
Clear recommendations.
What we captured, what's most at risk, and what's worth doing next.
Find out what it would take
The goal is to identify and capture the knowledge exists somewhere other than people's heads.
How it works
Three steps, easy on your experts' time.
We talk.
A short call to pinpoint whose knowledge would hurt most to lose. We scope it and send a clear quote. No obligation.
We run the interviews.
Structured subject matter expert (SME) interview sessions, usually 60 to 90 minutes each. Your experts just answer questions. No homework, no slides. We call it the Knowledge Capture Workshop.
You get the goods.
Recording, transcript, recommendations. The knowledge is now somewhere safe.
Your experts get to leave a legacy: their knowledge preserved and passed on.
And the part you feel: peace of mind.
Capture knowledge while you still can
Capturing knowledge gives you:
- A clear map of what knowledge you have.
- Ownership over your information.
- A few people's best practices become everyone's.
- Your business keeps running smoothly when people leave.
Start with a quick call. We'll help you figure out who and what are most at risk, and quote what it takes to capture their knowledge. No pressure, no obligation.
Common questions about our knowledge capture service
How much of our experts' time does this take?
It's quicker than you likely expect. Most engagements run a few 60- to 90-minute sessions per expert. They don't prepare anything. They show up and answer questions; we handle the structure.
Will our experts feel like they're being replaced?
A fair question, and the framing matters. Your experts already share what they know a thousand ways a week, every time someone stops by their desk with a question. Capturing it doesn't replace them; it makes that sharing permanent, rather than letting it evaporate. Our interviewers are trained to make sessions feel like passing the torch, and most experts end up enjoying the chance to put their life's work on the record.
Who owns the recordings and transcripts?
You do. Everything we capture belongs to you. No strings, no licensing games. After your knowledge capture sessions, we send you all the recordings, transcripts, and a short recommendation document with suggestions for using your knowledge.
What does it cost?
It depends on how many experts and topics you're capturing, which is exactly what the first call is for. We scope the work and send a clear quote before you commit to anything.
What happens to the knowledge after you capture it?
Your call. The recommendations lay out what's worth turning into training or documentation and what can simply be archived. Run with it yourself, or we can help you build training in a variety of ways.