Your Organization Has Experts. But Can They Teach Others?

Why developing the people who onboard, mentor, and share knowledge should be an organizational priority.

Introduction

Every organization depends on knowledge transfer. Research institutions rely on experienced staff to onboard study personnel. Healthcare organizations depend on professionals to explain procedures and compliance expectations. Higher education institutions rely on faculty, administrators, and subject-matter experts to mentor colleagues and develop future professionals.

Across industries, experienced employees, managers, and organizational leaders help others learn the systems, processes, and expectations that keep organizations operating effectively.

Whether the goal is onboarding new employees, supporting compliance efforts, preserving institutional knowledge, developing future leaders, strengthening department performance, or helping teams adapt to change, organizations depend on people who can effectively share what they know.

Yet many organizations invest heavily in developing expertise and far less in preparing people to share it. That imbalance may not seem significant until onboarding takes longer than expected, important knowledge becomes concentrated in a handful of employees, or teams begin interpreting the same process differently.

Subject-matter expertise is essential.

Helping others learn from that expertise is a different skill.

Knowledge Transfer Happens Everywhere

When people think about workplace learning, they often focus on formal education, professional development programs, conferences, workshops, or online training.
However, some of the most important learning happens through everyday interactions.

A senior employee explains a process to a new hire. A manager introduces a new workflow. An experienced coordinator helps a colleague navigate unfamiliar responsibilities. A department leader helps employees adapt to change. A faculty member mentors a junior researcher.

These moments shape how knowledge moves throughout an organization. They influence how quickly employees become productive, how consistently they follow procedures, and how effectively the organization preserves and shares institutional knowledge.

The challenge is that expertise alone does not guarantee effective knowledge transfer.

Subject-Matter Expertise and Teaching Require Different Skills

Organizations often ask their most knowledgeable employees to teach, mentor, onboard, or guide others. The decision seems obvious. After all, who better to explain a process than the person who knows it best? In practice, however, knowing something and teaching it are different capabilities.

Consider an experienced clinical research coordinator who has spent years navigating study operations. That individual may be the ideal person to prepare new staff members. Yet explaining concepts clearly, identifying potential misunderstandings, answering questions, and helping others apply knowledge require skills beyond operational expertise.

The same challenge appears when:

• Faculty mentor graduate students.
• Compliance professionals educate colleagues.
• Research administrators onboard new study personnel.
• Laboratory managers prepare new staff members.
• Healthcare professionals introduce procedures.
• Department leaders prepare employees for expanded responsibilities.
• Managers coach employees and develop future leaders.

An effective instructor helps others understand how and why to do it.

Knowledge Transfer Is a Business Issue

Organizations often view teaching, mentoring, and onboarding as individual responsibilities. In reality, they can affect the entire organization.

When knowledge transfer is inconsistent, organizations may experience:

• Longer onboarding periods
• Uneven employee development
• Knowledge silos
• Inconsistent processes
• Greater dependence on a small number of experts
• Difficulty preparing future leaders

When critical knowledge resides primarily with a few experienced individuals, organizations become more vulnerable. Valuable expertise can become difficult to scale across teams, harder to preserve when responsibilities change, and more difficult to retain when key employees retire, change roles, or leave the organization.

Over time, these challenges can affect workforce readiness, operational consistency, knowledge retention, compliance efforts, and an organization’s ability to manage risk effectively.

For organizations operating in research, healthcare, higher education, compliance, and other specialized fields, effective knowledge transfer is more than a professional development concern. It is an organizational capability.

Stronger Onboarding Requires More Than Experience

Many onboarding programs rely heavily on experienced employees. Those individuals often understand their work exceptionally well, but they may never have received guidance on how to help others learn.

As a result, onboarding quality can vary significantly from one team or department to another.

One employee may receive clear explanations, practical context, and opportunities to ask questions. Another may receive large amounts of information without understanding what matters most or how it applies to their role.

Developing employees who support onboarding can help organizations create more consistent learning experiences and help new team members gain confidence more quickly.

Adults Need Relevance

Experienced professionals bring prior knowledge, workplace experience, and established ways of thinking to every learning experience.

As a result, they often want to understand:

• Why is this important?
• How does it relate to my work?
• When will I use it?
• What problem does it solve?

When learning connects to real responsibilities and practical application, engagement often improves. This is one reason effective mentors, trainers, and instructors do more than present information. They help learners understand why the information matters.

Consistency of Information Does Not Guarantee Consistency of Understanding

Organizations understandably want employees to receive accurate and consistent information. That is important. However, consistent information does not automatically produce consistent understanding.

Employees have different experience levels, responsibilities, and contexts. Helping individuals reach the same outcome may require different explanations, examples, or approaches.

The objective remains the same. The path to achieving it may not. Organizations that recognize this reality are often better positioned to support learning, development, and long-term success.

How Do You Know Knowledge Transferred?

Organizations can usually document that learning activities occurred. Employees attended a session. They completed onboarding. They reviewed resources. They participated in a workshop.

These measures provide useful information. However, organizations should also ask a more important question:

Can employees apply what they learned when and where it matters?

The answer often determines whether knowledge-sharing efforts truly achieve their intended purpose. Effective knowledge transfer is not simply about access to information. It is about helping people understand, retain, and apply what they need to know.

Developing Internal Teaching Capabilities

Teaching, mentoring, onboarding, coaching, and guiding others are professional capabilities. Like leadership and communication skills, professionals can develop these capabilities over time.

Employees who strengthen these skills may be better prepared to:

• Share expertise clearly
• Support onboarding efforts
• Connect learning to workplace responsibilities
• Provide meaningful feedback
• Identify learning needs
• Contribute to employee development

The goal is not to turn every expert into a professional educator. The goal is to help the people responsible for developing others become more effective in that responsibility.

Develop the People Who Develop Others

Organizations invest significant resources in building expertise. The greatest value from that investment often occurs when teams can share, apply, and sustain expertise.

Preparing the professionals who teach, mentor, onboard, and guide others can help organizations strengthen onboarding, preserve institutional knowledge, support employee development, improve continuity during periods of change, and reinforce organizational efforts around consistency, compliance, and risk management.

CITI Program’s Teaching and Training for Professionals helps organizations build the capabilities needed to support onboarding, mentoring, knowledge transfer, employee development, and other responsibilities performed by professionals who teach, guide, and develop others.

The course is designed for professionals who teach, train, mentor, onboard, or guide colleagues as part of their roles. Organizations do not simply depend on expertise. They depend on their ability to pass that expertise on.