The situation behind the numbers above
Nearly a third of senior technical staff were eligible to retire within three years, and new hires took 9+ months to reach full productivity — because the knowledge that mattered most lived only in veterans' heads, never in a manual anyone could find.
A knowledge risk map ranked every critical process by who held it and how likely they were to leave. High-risk knowledge got structured capture sessions, a searchable hub, and a paired successor with shadowing checkpoints — years before the goodbye, not weeks.
Documentation wasn't the bottleneck — findability was. And knowledge loss is a retention problem in disguise: losing a veteran means losing the only copy of decisions that were never written down.