Nearly 40% of Swiss companies have no real plan to protect what their best people know. Retirements are accelerating. Roles are changing fast. And most organisations are still hoping the knowledge will somehow stick around on its own.
Picture your most experienced team member walking out the door for the last time. Now ask yourself: where does their knowledge actually live? Is it written down anywhere? Can someone else do what they do? Does anyone even know everything they know?
For most companies in Switzerland — whether you’re in Geneva, Zurich, or anywhere in between — the honest answer is: no. That knowledge lives in one person’s head. And when they leave, it goes with them.
- 40% of Swiss companies have no strategy to protect critical knowledge (OFS, 2023)
- 2× faster role evolution than a decade ago, driven by digitisation and AI
- 70% of what people know at work is never written down or recorded
Most managers know knowledge transfer matters. The problem is what they do about it. Usually: a handover document, a few weeks of shadowing, a shared folder. Then the person leaves — and three months later everyone is scrambling to find information that no longer exists anywhere.
The real issue is that organisations treat knowledge transfer as a logistical problem, when it is actually a teaching problem. And teaching is a skill. One that most people doing it inside companies have never been trained for.
Ask yourself:
When a key person leaves your team, what is your actual plan for keeping what they know? A farewell lunch and a handover email is not a plan.
Explaining something clearly is not the same as teaching it
Here is the first mistake most companies make: they think that if someone explains something well, the knowledge has been passed on. It hasn’t. Research from the University of Geneva’s Institute for Educational Sciences shows that learning is far more complicated than that.
Knowledge doesn’t transfer like a file being copied from one computer to another. The person receiving it has to build it themselves — using their own experience, their own context, their own understanding. A great expert is not automatically a great teacher. What actually makes the difference is how well you listen, check for understanding, and adjust how you explain things. These are skills. And like any skill, they can be learned — but only if someone actually teaches them.
The gap between what an expert knows and what a junior understands is not closed by more explanation. It is closed by better conversation.
There are also hidden emotional barriers that nobody talks about. A junior employee who is afraid of looking stupid will not ask questions. A senior employee who worries about becoming replaceable may hold back — without even realising it. These are not personal failures. They are predictable human dynamics. And they can be addressed — but only if you design your knowledge transfer process with them in mind.
A group can speed up learning — or completely block it
Most training in Swiss companies happens in groups. And groups are unpredictable. Put the right people together with a skilled facilitator, and learning accelerates. Put the wrong dynamic in a room with no structure, and people shut down — even if the content is excellent.
Research from Piaget, Vygotsky, and Kolb all point to the same thing: people learn faster and remember more when they learn with others — through discussion, challenge, and shared experience. But this only works when the group is well managed. When it isn’t, the opposite happens.
Ask yourself:
Who runs your internal training sessions? Are they trained facilitators — or just the most senior person who happened to be available?
When one or two people dominate the room, the others stop participating. When the hierarchy is too visible, people don’t ask real questions. A good facilitator knows how to manage all of this — the pace, the personalities, the silences. It takes practice. It takes awareness. And it makes an enormous difference to what people actually take away.
Adults don’t learn the same way children do. Most training ignores this.
Adults need a reason to learn something before they can absorb it. They need to connect new information to what they already know. They need to feel that their experience counts — not that they are starting from zero. This is the core idea behind andragogy, a concept developed by Malcolm Knowles in the 1970s that has become the foundation of adult learning design.
Ignore this, and here is what happens: the person sits through the training, nods politely, and changes nothing. Not because they are lazy — but because the training wasn’t designed for how adults actually learn. The content may have been perfectly good. The delivery may have been clear. But if the learner couldn’t see why it mattered to them personally, it simply didn’t land.
Ask yourself:
Does your internal training start with what the learner already knows — and why this topic matters to them? Or does it start with what the trainer wants to say?
People don’t learn by watching. They learn by doing.
The biggest myth in corporate training: if you explain it well enough, people will remember it. They won’t. The forgetting curve, discovered by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, shows that adults forget up to 70% of what they hear within 24 hours — unless they actively use it.
Role play, real case studies, practice, peer teaching, hands-on exercises — these are not just nice extras. They are how learning actually sticks. Kolb’s learning cycle — experience something, reflect on it, understand it, try it again — gives any trainer a simple structure that works for almost any topic. The implication is straightforward: if your knowledge transfer sessions are mostly people talking at a screen, they are probably not working as well as you think.
A happy feedback form is not proof that anything was learned
Most organisations measure training with a quick satisfaction survey at the end. “Was the trainer clear? Was the room comfortable?” That tells you almost nothing useful.
The Kirkpatrick model — the most widely used evaluation framework in professional training — measures four things: did people like it, did they learn something, did they change their behaviour, and did it produce results? Most Swiss companies only check the first one. Almost none check the third or fourth — which are the only ones that tell you whether the training actually worked. The OECD’s 2024 review of Switzerland highlights this gap directly, calling for stronger competency frameworks as automation reshapes the workforce.
Ask yourself:
Three months after your last internal training, did anyone check whether people were actually doing things differently? If not — how do you know it worked?
Four things that actually make knowledge transfer work
- 01
Teach people how to communicate, not just what to say Give your internal trainers real tools: how to check for understanding, how to adjust their explanation on the fly, how to ask questions that reveal what someone has and hasn’t grasped. Don’t assume that being good at something means being good at explaining it.
- 02
Train people to run groups, not just present to them Facilitation is its own skill. It means managing pace, drawing out quiet voices, handling disagreement, and noticing when the group has switched off. The person running the session needs to manage the room as much as the content.
- 03
Design training for the person learning, not the person teaching Start with what people already know. Make the “why” clear before the “what.” Keep sessions short enough to stay focused. Build in time to practice. The best internal training feels relevant from the first five minutes — not like something imposed from above.
- 04
Measure whether behaviour changed, not whether people smiled Go back three months later. Are people doing things differently? Is the knowledge actually being used? If you can’t answer that, you don’t know whether the transfer happened. Evaluation is not a formality — it is the only honest way to know if any of this worked.
This is not an HR problem. It’s a business risk.
Baby boomers are retiring across Switzerland — taking with them knowledge built over 30 or 40 years. At the same time, AI and digital tools are reshaping what jobs look like faster than most companies can keep up. In Geneva, Vaud, Zurich, and beyond — this is not something coming. It is already happening.
Companies that build a real system for transferring knowledge internally will have a serious advantage. The skills needed to do this well — communicating, facilitating, designing for adult learners, evaluating honestly — are not rare or complicated. They just need to be taken seriously and properly developed.
The question isn’t whether your organisation values knowledge. It’s whether you’ve built something that actually moves it from one person to the next.
The companies that will win over the next decade are not the ones with the smartest people. They are the ones who figured out how to pass that knowledge on.
Want to build this capability inside your organisation?
Swissnova’s Train the Trainer programme is available iacross Switzerland. It gives your people the communication, facilitation and evaluation skills to turn what your experts know into something your whole organisation can use.
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