Knowledge retention in construction in the UAE

With employees leaving construction organizations for all sorts of reasons, it is imperative that organizations look at ways to retain their knowledge. This paper presents a four step process in order to ensure knowledge retention. The four steps include: Socialization, codification, combination and internalization. A four level maturity model is also presented in this paper. These levels of the maturity model provide an indication of how effective will the knowledge retention be in an organization. The levels also provide the ability to assess what needs to be done in order to improve the effectiveness of knowledge retention in an organization. In order to assess the effectiveness of the model, it was applied to a construction consultancy company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). After the analysis of the case study some of the major factors highlighted as crucial for the success of knowledge retention are: culture, organizational structure, configuration management, publicity and marketing, training, IT system with ability to capture multiple formats, and reward and recognition. Although, this paper presents the model for construction sector it can easily be adopted for other sectors