In a nutshell: Structured shadowing and reverse mentoring are necessary to preserve the implicit knowledge of aging IT specialists before their retirement.
In 2026, a critical number of baby boomers retire, which will affect banks, industry and public authorities. Without systematic knowledge transfer, there is a risk of losing experiential knowledge about business-critical legacy systems.
The aging of the working population in German IT infrastructure teams reaches a critical point in 2026. The Bitkom digital association documents that approximately 109,000 IT positions are currently vacant. This gap is exacerbated by the retirement wave: the number of incoming graduates does not come close to compensating for departing experts. In parallel, the Randstad-ifo HR survey for Q1 2026 shows that 70 percent of companies already employ staff beyond the regular retirement age – 68 percent justify this primarily with knowledge retention and know-how transfer.
Core applications and infrastructure components in financial institutions, industrial companies and public authorities were often implemented decades ago and have since been maintained by a few specialists. The Lünendonk study on IT modernization shows the impact: 34 percent of surveyed IT managers state that they find it difficult to properly assess the knowledge bound in legacy systems and its actual potential. This deficit becomes a business risk when these specialists are absent.
The problem lies in the nature of knowledge itself. Classical practice reduces knowledge transfer to the last two to four weeks before retirement – a handover protocol or brief onboarding. Knowledge research, however, distinguishes between explicit knowledge (documentable in manuals, ticket systems, code) and implicit knowledge (experience, intuition, historical system context). An administrator who has maintained a mainframe architecture for 30 years knows system states and emergency command sequences that are not listed in any manual – and these procedures are often applied unconsciously. A handover protocol cannot capture such deep structures.
Structured methods are required. The shadowing model has successors work directly alongside the senior for several months – not just observing routine tasks, but systematically documenting informal solution approaches when unforeseen anomalies arise. Reverse mentoring complements this approach: the senior learns modern technologies from younger employees while passing on their implicit experiential knowledge. Such investments in early, systematic knowledge preservation significantly reduce the operational risk of critical systems.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 1 July 2026
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