When Professional Expertise Leaves What Remains:

When Professional Expertise Leaves What Remains: Developing the Organisational Knowledge Continuity Theory for digitally enabled professional learning Session contributors: Toyosi Samuel, Iqra Abbas, Anu Theresa, Kavishka Hewage, Riya Rachel Vinod. Presenters: Dr Toyosi Samuel and Anu Theresa. What happens when an experienced colleague leaves an organisation? Their files may remain, but much of what made their contribution valuable can leave with them: professional judgement, contextual understanding, established relationships, problem-solving routines and lessons accumulated through practice. This is not simply a records-management problem. It is a learning problem. At ALTC26, we will introduce the Organisational Knowledge Continuity Theory (OKCT), a middle-range theory that explains how professionally held knowledge can move beyond the individual and become accessible, trustworthy and continuously renewed organisational knowledge. Our session, “Developing the Organisational Knowledge Continuity Theory: An Educational Technology Perspective on Professional Expertise and Organisational Learning”, considers how educational technology can support this process without reducing knowledge to documents stored in a digital repository. Why knowledge continuity needs a learning perspective Organisations invest considerable time and resources in recruiting, developing and retaining capable professionals. Yet knowledge can still be lost through retirement, employee mobility, restructuring, redeployment or succession. Traditional responses often concentrate on handover notes, databases, policies and document repositories. These are useful, but preserving information is not the same as sustaining expertise. Professional knowledge often includes tacit and experiential elements that are difficult to articulate. Even when knowledge is documented, it must still be located, evaluated, interpreted and applied by another person. It may also need to be challenged or updated as circumstances change. Knowledge continuity therefore depends on a learning process through which captured expertise becomes meaningful professional capability and, eventually, improved organisational practice. What OKCT proposes OKCT brings together ideas from the Knowledge-Based View, SECI Knowledge Creation Theory, Organisational Learning Theory, Organisational Memory Theory and Absorptive Capacity Theory. It integrates twelve connected constructs across four domains: professional knowledge foundations; knowledge formalisation and availability; knowledge quality and capability development; and organisational continuity and renewal. The proposed process begins with the knowledge base, differential knowledge and professional expertise held by individuals. It then moves through formalised knowledge capture, digital preservation and access. Crucially, it does not stop there. Captured knowledge must be validated, reflectively internalised and applied to professional capability development. Through use, feedback and collective learning, it can contribute to organisational knowledge continuity, organisational learning and knowledge enrichment. This makes the theory recursive rather than linear. Knowledge is not preserved once and treated as complete. It is reviewed, applied, questioned and enriched as new professional experience emerges. Educational technology as enabling infrastructure Educational technology can make professional expertise easier to capture, revisit and learn from. Digital knowledge artefacts, instructional videos, intelligent repositories, learning management systems and AI-supported organisational memory can support onboarding, mentoring, continuing professional development, collaborative learning and knowledge reuse across organisational boundaries. However, OKCT does not treat technology as an independent solution. A repository can preserve inaccurate or outdated material just as efficiently as it preserves useful knowledge. AI can improve search, summarisation and knowledge discovery, but it can also reproduce errors, remove important context or create false confidence in unreliable content. The value of these technologies depends on human validation, responsible governance, transparency, accountability and continuous renewal. Our position is therefore sociotechnical: sustainable knowledge continuity emerges from the alignment of digital systems with professional judgement, organisational routines, learning design and human responsibility. Questions we will explore at ALTC26 How can organisations capture professional expertise without stripping away the context that gives it meaning? What turns a stored digital artefact into a resource that genuinely supports professional learning? How should captured knowledge be validated, governed and updated before it becomes part of organisational memory? Where can AI strengthen knowledge continuity, and where must human judgement remain decisive? How can organisations determine whether preserved knowledge is being internalised, applied and enriched in practice? An invitation to continue the conversation OKCT is a conceptual theory and now requires empirical testing across different organisational settings. At ALTC26, we hope to use the session not only to present the framework, but also to invite critical discussion from colleagues working in learning technology, professional development, organisational learning and knowledge management. We are especially interested in the practical experiences of participants: what forms of expertise are most vulnerable to loss in your organisation, which technologies are already being used to preserve them, and what prevents stored knowledge from becoming shared learning? These questions can help refine the theory and connect it with the realities of professional practice. Join us at ALTC26 to explore how organisations can move from simply retaining information to sustaining professional knowledge as a living, trustworthy and continuously developing learning resource.