At the Workplace Learning Summit 2025 we tested a simple idea:

If you put the right people in the room and ask the right questions, the best expertise won’t come from the stage – it’ll come from each other.

Leaders from engineering, medtech, logistics, public service, higher education and tech spent a full day talking honestly about knowledge sharing in the workplace: what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.We recorded the table conversations (with permission), transcribed them, and have been analysing them since. What follows is a synthesis of the big themes and standout lines – and a preview of the playbooks, blogs and practical guides we’ll be publishing over the coming weeks.

From “more content” to “better connection”

The day opened with a challenge to the old idea that you can fix everything with “more training” or “more content”.

Instead of another handbook or course, participants described a different set of priorities:

• Creating a learning organization where people can actually find and apply what they already know
  
• Making it easy to share knowledge with team members in the flow of work
  
• Using technology and knowledge management systems to connect people, not just store files
  

As one participant put it:

“We don’t have a knowledge problem. We have a findability and sharing problem.”

Across dozens of conversations, four big challenges kept showing up.

1. Capturing in-house know-how before it walks out the door

Every organisation seemed to have “that person”:

• The engineer who knows the legacy system by heart
  
• The night-shift supervisor who can fix any problem at 3am
  
• The administrator who “just knows” how to get things done
  

They’re heroes. But they’re also a risk.

People talked about organizational knowledge sitting in one person’s head, one old spreadsheet or one local drive. Many of those heroes are close to retirement. When they leave, their knowledge leaves with them.

What’s starting to work:

• Communities of practice where anyone can ask a question once and everyone can see the answer
  
• Simple knowledge capture habits – quick videos, annotated screenshots, short posts instead of 30-page SOPs
  
• Internal tools (including AI-powered search) that act like a knowledge base software layer over years of documents
  

The shift is from “write a big manual” to “create a living, searchable knowledge sharing system that people actually use”.

2. Onboarding & mentoring: the first 90 days make or break it

Ask someone about their first 90 days in a new job and you get strong reactions.

We heard about:

• New starters drowning in policies and “click-to-complete” modules
  
• “Hybrid” teams where everyone is technically in the office, but really just on separate calls with headsets
  
• People leaving after 6–9 months because they never really felt supported
  

Underneath that is a simple truth: onboarding is knowledge management in the workplace at its most human. You’re not just giving people documents; you’re helping them build relationships and confidence.

What good looked like in the room:

• A designed 90-day journey, not just Day 1
  
• A buddy or mentor who wants the role, not whoever had a gap in their calendar
  
• Short, regular check-ins focused on “What’s confusing?” not just “What are you doing?”
  
• New joiner cohorts (“Spring 2025 intake”) so people feel part of a group, not alone
  

Several organisations are now treating mentoring as part of their leadership and knowledge sharing strategy: mentors get recognition, support and, in some cases, faster progression.Over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing a First 90 Days Onboarding Playbook with templates and checklists drawn directly from these stories.

3. Technology: too many tools, not enough “front door”

Nobody needs another system login.

Participants listed a familiar stack: LMS, intranet, Teams, Slack, ERP, CRM, shared drives, wikis… each with a different owner and a different login.

The result?

“I spend more time asking where something is than actually learning from it.”

The opportunities we heard about were less “buy more tech” and more “make tech behave better”:

• One front door for knowledge – a knowledge sharing platform where people start when they have a question
  
• Short, multi-format content: 2–3 minute “How do I…?” clips, plus text and transcripts, not just long PDFs
  
• Spaces for real collaboration and knowledge sharing – questions, comments, shout-outs – instead of static repositories
  

In other words, a modern knowledge management platform should feel more like a social space and less like an archive.That’s exactly the space where Slick+ is focused: helping organisations create a simple, social “front door” for sharing best practices in the workplace, capturing improvements and making knowledge findable for everyone.

4. From “lessons learned” to learning in action

One frustration came up again and again:

“We do ‘lessons learned’ and then make the same mistakes.”

People described detailed after-action reports that nobody has time to read, and retros that feel like blame sessions rather than learning conversations.

The groups that felt more optimistic were doing things differently:

• Running Kaizen or improvement events where frontline staff map processes and redesign them together
  
• Creating simple but visible idea pipelines – you can see which ideas are being trialled and which have been adopted
  
• Using kudos, recognition walls and small rewards to celebrate people who share knowledge or fix problems
  

This is where knowledge management best practices become real: when people can see their ideas move from insight to implementation, they’re far more willing to keep contributing.We’ll be turning these patterns into a Knowledge-to-Action Playbook: practical ways to move from “we know this” to “we actually do this”.

5. AI, change & the human side of knowledge management

The afternoon turned to knowledge management and AI – and the mood in the room was honest.

Yes, generative AI and AI-powered knowledge bases can make it easier to search documents, draft content and answer questions. But people’s first reactions were human, not technical:

• “Is this about helping me, or replacing me?”
  
• “Can I trust the answers?”
  
• “Do I get a say in how this is used?
  

Participants shared a clear pattern from past rollouts of new tools:

• If communication is vague, people assume the worst
  
• If training is “one and done”, habits never form
  
• If feedback goes into a black hole, trust disappears
  

A better way, based on the summit discussions:

• Design the first 90 days of any new tool or AI rollout: Week 1, Month 1, Month 6
  
• Start with real, everyday use cases that make life easier for teams (not just big transformation stories)
  
• Use champions and early adopters to show concrete wins
  
• Treat AI as part of your knowledge sharing strategy, not a magic fix – it’s powerful, but it still sits inside your culture

We’ll be publishing an AI & Change 90-Day Guide that captures these insights and turns them into checklists, sample comms and workshop outlines.

What happens next: from summit to library of practical guides

The summit was deliberately built as a social learning lab. The real value is what we all do next with what we heard.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of resources – all grounded in attendee conversations and group work – including:

• If We Knew What We Know – an e-book on capturing critical know-how and reducing risk
  
• Onboarding in a BANI World – a practical guide to designing the first 90 days
  
• The Knowledge-to-Action Playbook – rituals and tools for turning insights into change
  
• Deskless Doesn’t Mean Disconnected – patterns for shift-based and mobile teams
  
• AI, Change & Human Concerns: A 90-Day Playbook – human-centred rollout patterns
  

Each piece will include real quotes, examples and templates you can adapt – whether you’re building a knowledge management system, choosing a knowledge sharing platform, or simply trying to make it easier for people to share knowledge at work.

If you’d like to get these as they’re released, make sure you’re:

• Subscribed to our newsletter, and
  
• Connected to the Workplace Learning Summit space in Slick+

Thank you again to everyone who contributed stories, doubts, experiments and hard-won lessons. You’ve given us a rich foundation to build on – and we’re looking forward to sharing it back with you in ways that are practical, honest and immediately useful.