What You Know: Capturing Your Professional Knowledge Before It Fades

Explicit knowledge — documents, files, records you produced — survives departure. Tacit knowledge does not. Within weeks, the name of the person who actually approves invoices, the workaround for the system that never worked correctly, and the context behind a piece of work you completed two years ago will have faded or become inaccessible.

This section is a structured capture exercise. It is addressed to you, not to your former employer. The beneficiary is the future version of you who will need to reference former colleagues, explain past projects to a new employer, or verify a professional contact three months from now.

Complete this in week one. Use the Knowledge Capture Sheet (Doc 3 in the Handover Pack) as the recording format.

Record the following before company directory access is removed. For each contact, note: full name, job title, personal email address (not company address), and a brief note on relevance or context.

• HR contact — the person who handled your exit. Retain for P45 queries, reference requests, and any outstanding entitlement questions.
• Payroll contact — direct contact for final pay, pension queries, and P45 follow-up.
• Line manager — retain as potential reference. Note whether they have agreed to provide one.
• Agreed references — list each person who has confirmed they will act as a reference, with their current role and personal contact details.
• Professional contacts worth retaining — colleagues, clients, suppliers, or counterparts you have worked with directly and who are relevant to your professional network. Include only those you would contact proactively; this is not a LinkedIn export.
• Legal or settlement contacts — if a solicitor or ACAS was involved in your exit, retain their details.

Document any accounts, subscriptions, or systems that require action before or after departure:

• Systems you administered — any platforms or tools where your work email was the account owner. Note the platform name, what it contains, and whether access needs to be transferred or closed.
• Subscriptions billed to you personally — any professional subscriptions you paid personally and expensed. Cancel or transfer as appropriate once employment ends.
• Accounts in your name for business purposes — domain registrations, hosting accounts, API keys, or other accounts registered under your personal details on behalf of the employer. Flag these to your employer if transfer is required.
• Access that will be revoked — note which systems you currently use and the date access is expected to end. This is relevant to anything you may need to retrieve — files, contacts, sent mail archives.
• Personal accounts using work email — any services (GitHub, Slack workspaces, professional memberships, cloud storage) where your work email is the login. Update to a personal address before access ends.

This is the undocumented layer — knowledge that exists nowhere except in your recollection of the role. Its value is not to the employer but to you: it informs how you describe the role, what you can reference in future interviews, and what context underpins the work in your portfolio.

Record answers to the following prompts. There are no wrong answers — the exercise is capture, not evaluation:

• What would a new hire not know to ask in their first month?
• Which processes had undocumented workarounds that everyone used?
• Which relationships were critical to getting things done, regardless of org chart?
• What recurring tasks did you own that were not in your job description?
• What are the two or three things you knew about this role that you could only learn by doing it?
• What would you tell a successor on their first day?

These answers are the raw material for CV bullet points, interview answers, and professional reference context. Write them now while the role is current.

The Knowledge Capture Sheet (Doc 3 in the Handover Pack) provides pre-labelled fields for contacts, systems, and tacit knowledge, with a worked example. Complete it in week one.