Several years ago we started talking about the fact that most of our managing staff were over 50 and would begin retiring.  However, we were looking at it more as how we would find replacements — not how do we keep our history.

This article in the Talent Management magazine http://www.talentmgt.com/talent.php?pt=a&aid=763 talks briefly about ways to plan for the transfer of the knowledge from our long time staff as they retire.  The 3 ways they discuss are: 

1. Phased retirement, begin by reducing the person’s hour but having them around to answer questions as they arise.
2. Ex-employee networking.  Allow for ex-employees to network with their replacements.
3. Council participation.  A group of retirees that meet to share their information.

How have you been addressing this issue?  Or is this not an issue your library system is facing?

Tags: mentoring, Retirees

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.