Tacit Knowledge within Talent Management refers to the implicit, experience-based knowledge that employees accumulate over time but is not easily documented or transferred. Effective talent management ensures that this valuable knowledge is retained within the organization by facilitating knowledge-sharing practices, such as mentorship, on-the-job training, and informal interactions, to prevent its loss when employees leave or retire. Organizations are losing their talented workers due to different reasons. Resignation, retirement etc. Some of this attrition can be estimated and monitored but some of them cannot. Losing talented employees are always costly both in terms of recruitment expense and the loss of cumulated tacit knowledge. Talent  management is very important to  maintain   desired turnover rate in an organization.

Talent management

Talent management is “simply a matter of anticipating the need for human talent and then setting out a plan to meet it.” Most organizations are not giving enough attention to talent management because some of them are regarding it as worthless and the others think that outsourcing is easier than managing talents. This can be true for the past era but being in this knowledge age talented people is gaining more value and as a result they are becoming scarce.

Thanks to effective talent management, talented people can be kept for a long time. Due to this long retention, they have opportunities not only to improve their knowledge but also to utilize and transfer the knowledge to others for the sake of their organization. People may quit their works for many reasons. Some of these reasons mostly are predictable such as retirement. Talent management for aging people is an important issue to work on. The loss of talented employees, mostly due to retirement, without their tacit knowledge being transferred to younger employees, is an important loss to consider.

Rather than having a strict daily working time, human resource departments should focus on the ways that help increase the conveyance of tacit knowledge from experienced and talented workers to new ones. For instance, even the coffee break time can help organizations to utilize this fact. When people have time to socialize, they share things with colleagues like speaking about projects, plans, prospect of company, personal ideas etc. In addition, some extra measures should also be taken into account by specifying in contracts that highlights “On Job Training”. The experienced workers should pass their tacit and explicit knowledge to new workers by the help of on job training. Having a specific time in terms of on job training can contribute greatly to the organizational knowledge.

Knowledge Management

Organizations have communal know-hows which are increasing day by day. These know-hows can be stored in databases, written on a piece of paper or kept in workers` minds. Taking, storing, using and delivering these know-hows to get optimum benefit is being called knowledge management. For most of the organizations, the most valuable asset is the knowledge itself. Same as before, the knowledge and its management has taken an important part especially for organizations and the level of significance of knowledge management can’t be reduced with the result of improving technology also. With the increasing use of information communication technologies (ICT), not only the modern technological devices, soft wares and databases have gained importance but also the people, using new technologies, having situational awareness on ICT security and keeping the organization’s knowledge safe and secure, have gained importance.

The paradigm of evolution of ICT seemingly has provided less use of human factor in organizations with the use of automatization systems, firewall, database and storage systems etc. Nevertheless, the importance of people working in technically equipped organizations has not faced a decline. From an organizational perspective, the valuable organizational memory and knowledge can be jeopardized and lost in seconds. How that kind of organization’s strike down can be perpetuated is not hard to guess in our interconnected world. Due to the negligence of a system administrator setting up a weak password for the database, lack of enough cyber security situational awareness may target an employer with a cyber-attack (spear fishing, water hole, ransomware etc.) and then the organization may lose a great deal of its assets and billions of dollars.

If the organizations want to get more benefit from their talented workers, they should lead them to increase their knowledge and keep them in their organizations for a long time. While they are increasing their tacit knowledge, they should have opportunities to share with others. This process can also be called knowledge management.

Attrition is one of the biggest problems that many organizations face. Beside attrition, promotion, job satifaction, mandatory service, frequent assignments are some other leading problem areas that affect knowledge management in the organizations.

Explicit & Tacit Knowledge

People along with the technology are going to keep and convey the organizational memory and knowledge with explicit and tacit knowledge. While the explicit knowledge is noticeable and usable due to of its nature, the tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge gained by know-hows and experience that hasn’t yet come to light.

^{Figure 1. Explicit Knowledge vs Tacit Knowledge}

The explicit knowledge can be systematized and contribute the needs of individual and organization whereas the tacit knowledge can’t be accounted directly for the use of organization unless it is exported or made an explicit one.

^{Figure 2. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge Ratio Chart}

Tacit knowledge is a kind of knowledge which is attained by a person without any notice during the courses of his actions. Explicit knowledge is just “information” which can be stored and distributed easily by means of different media.