Preventing Brain Drain
Once used to describe the outflow of intellectual capital to other countries, the term “brain drain” has taken on new meaning for the Air Force as it braces to lose a significant portion of its experienced employee population to retirement.
To stem that loss, members of the human factors group at the University of Dayton Research Institute are developing a system to capture the knowledge and experience of Air Force employees close to retirement age. The same system will then sort, store and move the information to younger workers coming up through the ranks – whether they are sitting behind a desk or are out in the battlefield.
“The Air Force Materiel Command alone could lose as much as 60 percent of its top science and engineering staff during the next five years,” said Paul Piechota, manager of the Engineering Training and Knowledge Preservation System. UDRI has been contracted to have an initial test version of the system up and running for the 1,100 engineering personnel at AFMC’s Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma in the fall. During the following two years, the program is expected to be in place for the remaining 7,000 engineers within the Command.
“If this is successful, other Air Force commands as well as other military branches are expected to implement the system,” Piechota said. “Several commercial enterprises also are watching for the success of this program.”
Piechota said brain drain is a global problem as baby boomers come of retirement age, and industry competition is fierce for the limited number of graduates with degrees in science and engineering. To help attract and develop younger workers, ETKPS will include a career management element that will work hand-in-hand with the knowledge preservation side of the program.
Dave Kancler, a UDRI human factors psychologist directing software development and other technical elements for the program, said information storage and management will be performed using a database. Collection will occur through a variety of methods.
“There are actually several approaches we will take to capture knowledge and experience from senior-level employees, because one solution simply will not be appropriate for all people,” Kancler said. “At this point, we plan to use three primary methods. The first is video documentation. If a worker is proficient in a complicated process, we’ll actually film him performing that process.”
The second method involves collecting information directly from senior employees. “They might provide notes, reports or other text documents, or we can set them up to interviewed by an avatar system – a computer-generated image of a talking head that can be programmed to ask the employee a series of questions. Our experience with this type of system shows that people tend to relax and speak more freely when they are talking to a ‘virtual’ personality.”
The third primary method will be to set up a wiki, or a type of “living document” that can be edited by several people with experience in a particular subject, Kancler said. “As methodologies for a particular process change over time, the document can be updated in real time.”
After the information is collected in the form of documents, video files, transcripts and the like, it will be entered into the database for storage and retrieval. Each file will be “tagged” with a series of key words related to its content for quick search and access.
“When someone needs information on a particular skill set or process, it’s imperative that information be easy to access electronically, because not everyone who needs it will be sitting at a desk,” Piechota said. “That person could be standing on a flight line dealing with a critical situation, and his only link to help might be his BlackBerry.”
Although the career management facet of ETKPS will have a different focus than knowledge preservation, the two sides of the system will complement one another, Kancler said.
“The career management element will provide important training information to help less-seasoned workers achieve their goals. A profile will be created and stored for each employee, outlining not only the areas in which they are already proficient, but also their career goals. The database also will be programmed with information pertaining to career paths within engineering, as well as the steps and information necessary to succeed along those paths.”
The system will then feed the employees information on training – even when and where it will be offered – as well as other steps necessary to achieve their goals.
“Over time and as an engineer progresses through the ranks, her profile will be updated; as she gains important experience and knowledge she thinks will be valuable to current colleagues and future workers, she can add that to the system as well,” Kancler said.
“While there’s an urgency to capture the knowledge and experience of today’s older workers before they become unavailable, today’s younger workers will be adding this knowledge to the system as they grow. By the time they retire, their knowledge will already be in the system.”
May 1, 2008
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