A resignation rarely hits the business on the day it is handed in. It hits three months later, when the first case turns up that only one person used to decide. What is missing then is not the manual. It is the reason this one customer is quoted differently from everyone else.
Knowledge tied to a single person shows up in no report while that person is there. It becomes visible through their absence. Let the weeks between notice and last working day pass unused, and the loss gets paid later: in calls to former colleagues, in mistakes on rare cases, in onboarding that takes twice as long.
How do I secure knowledge when long serving employees leave the company?
By naming the tasks that come to a halt without that person, and recording only those. The rest can wait, and most of it already sits somewhere.
Knowledge retention is the planned recording of knowledge held by a single person, so that somebody else can do the task afterwards without asking that person. The measure is therefore not the number of documents, but whether another person carries the work.
- 1.List the tasks of the departing person, together with them rather than over their head.
- 2.Note for each task who else can do it. If nobody is named there, the task belongs on the list.
- 3.Name the successor early. Without a recipient, the recording turns into a document for the archive.
- 4.Record knowledge on closed cases, not in a general conversation about the job.
- 5.Test the handover on a real task while the departing person is still in the building.
Which knowledge should be secured first?
The knowledge behind the decisions, not the operation of the software. Click paths are in the vendor manual. The rule for the exception is written nowhere.
- Decisions nobody else can stand in for: a quotation, a discount, the sign off on a deviation.
- Exceptions with expensive consequences: the customer with a separate delivery agreement, the part with the long lead time.
- Contacts: who actually answers at which supplier and which question they want settled in advance.
- Quiet deadlines: the filing that falls due once a year and that one person has remembered so far.
Nothing belongs on the list that is traceable in the system or in the vendor manual. The test is one question: what happens if this task is done wrong next week? If the answer stays harmless, skip the recording.
How much time is left between notice and the last working day?
Less than the notice period suggests. According to the WKO, an employer notice period in Austria runs six weeks in the first and second year of service and rises to two months from the third year, three from the sixth, four from the sixteenth and five from the twenty sixth. Since 1 October 2021 they apply to salaried employees and wage earners alike, again according to the WKO.
If the employee resigns, the statutory period under the WKO is one month to the end of a calendar month unless something else was agreed. That is the more common case with experienced specialists. The period is not free working time either: for an employer notice the WKO states a right to at least one fifth of regular weekly hours for job searching, and remaining leave takes its share too.
The date for knowledge retention is the day notice is given, not the final week. In the final week the person is already in the new job in their head, and the calendar belongs to farewells.
What makes a retirement different
It can be planned. The date is known years in advance, so the recording spreads over months instead of being squeezed into a notice period. As a guide, six to twelve months of lead time is reasonable, depending on how many tasks sit with that person alone.
The occasion is becoming more frequent. Among people aged 55 to 64 in Austria, according to Statistics Austria, 60.9 percent were in employment in 2025, after 58.8 percent the year before. More staff in that age group means more exits from roles somebody has held for twenty years.
The expected date is moving as well. Since 1 January 2024 the pension age for women in Austria is being raised from 60 to 65 in half year steps for the 1964 to 1968 cohorts, according to the Austrian pension insurance institution. A succession planned around the old retirement age is planned around the wrong date.
How do you record experience?
On closed cases. Do not ask how quoting works in general. Go through three quotations from recent months and ask for the reason behind every deviation.
A public template for the procedure exists. The Wissensstafette on wissensmanagement.gv.at, published by the Austrian federal ministry for civil service and sport, describes the transfer of experience on a change of post or a retirement in three phases: preparation with a catalogue of topics, moderated interviews recorded as a knowledge map and confirmed by the departing person, and a handover workshop with the future team.
- How did you notice that the standard route did not fit here?
- What would have happened if you had decided otherwise?
- Who did you call beforehand, and why that person in particular?
Keep rule and example separate from personal judgement. A rule still holds once the person has gone. A judgement should be marked as one, so the successor knows what is settled and what is open.
How do you know the handover held?
By the successor closing a real case on their own before the other person leaves. Every question in that trial run marks a gap in the records and is answered there, not verbally.
After that, each record needs a responsible person and an occasion for updating it, such as a change in the system or in the workflow. Without both, the filing turns into a pile of documents nobody trusts a year from now.
How such a project runs, from the overview of critical tasks to a tested handover record, is described on our page on knowledge retention. If the question covers the whole business rather than a single role, business succession is the better entry point. For the running workflows themselves, our article on documenting processes without extra work sets out the approach.