The Bottom Line: The retirement of IT specialists threatens companies through knowledge drain, but can be systematically mitigated through early transfer methods such as shadowing and reverse mentoring.
With the retirement of baby boomer birth cohorts from 2026 onwards, central IT specialists are leaving companies — many of them are the sole custodians of undocumented knowledge about core systems. Without structured knowledge management, the loss of business-critical expertise is imminent.
Demographic trends are hitting German companies’ IT infrastructures at a critical moment. According to data from the Digital Association Bitkom, approximately 109,000 IT positions are currently unfilled, while birth cohorts from the early 1960s are beginning to retire in large numbers from 2026. The Lünendonk study on IT modernization underscores the scale: approximately 34 percent of surveyed IT decision-makers find it increasingly difficult to assess the knowledge embedded in legacy systems and its potential. Many core applications and infrastructure components in banks, industrial companies, and government agencies were implemented decades ago and are maintained by only a few specialists.
The Randstad-ifo HR survey from the first quarter of 2026 illustrates the countermeasures being implemented: 70 percent of companies employ workers beyond the regular retirement age; 68 percent cite knowledge preservation and know-how transfer as the primary reason. However, the problem lies in the manner of knowledge transfer currently being practiced. Traditional handover protocols in the final two to four weeks before retirement fall short — they capture only explicit knowledge in manuals and documentation. The more valuable implicit knowledge is based on decades of experience, intuition, and historical system understanding. An administrator who has maintained a mainframe architecture for 30 years knows solution pathways for exceptional cases that are not documented in any manual and that in an emergency can make the difference between system failure and continued operation.
Structured methods must be established early to preserve this wealth of experience. The shadowing model provides that successors work directly alongside the experienced administrator over several months — not merely observing routine tasks, but deliberately documenting informal solution pathways when unforeseen system anomalies occur. Complementing this, reverse mentoring is becoming established in IT teams, whereby the classical mentoring relationship is reversed and younger employees pass on their digital and technological know-how to senior staff, while the latter in turn share their system history and experience.
For CISOs, this knowledge drain represents a significant security risk: implicit knowledge about security gaps in legacy systems, about undocumented network dependencies, or about critical patch sequences is lost. Proactive knowledge preservation is therefore not merely a staffing matter, but an essential component of cyber resilience and risk management.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 1 July 2026
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