Originally Posted by Ghostvette

The challenge is identifying what precisely they know. Sometimes it something as simple as how to use a tool or how to get things to work with what's on hand. Tribal knowledge is hard to put down on paper, most of what I know didn't come from a book. It came from doing things the hard way, breaking what I was trying to work on and figuring out the right way to fix it. You can be told and shown how to do something, but until you do it, and fail doing it, it doesn't stick.

I suppose the best way is to have each SME have a shadow that can learn from them, but that is an expense that most companies won't do. Most SMEs have knowledge that the company isn't paying for, the company pays for what they know to do their job and that's it. It's unfortunate.