NRC ‘Knowledge Center' Helps Younger Employees Benefit from Experts' Experience
August 29, 2011
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last fall began identifying hundreds of employees with expertise it deems too valuable to lose.
It captures that expertise by a variety of means — recorded presentations and interviews, collected documents — for posting on the online NRC Knowledge Center. Veteran employees also connect with staff through mentor programs, job shadowing and brown-bag lunches.
"The workforce today doesn't have the 30 years of experience in licensing and inspecting nuclear power plants," said Patricia Eng, NRC's senior adviser for knowledge management. "In 2009, 50 percent of the NRC staff had been with us for less than five years," which created a "huge training issue," she said.
The Knowledge Center was created to tackle that issue.
Open only to NRC employees and contractors, the Web portal operates like GovLoop, a social networking site for workers and contractors governmentwide. There are virtual communities of practice, based on profession and skill set, where members can post questions and answers, documents and videos that are permanently stored and available for view. The information is tagged with keywords and phrases to make it searchable. Members are alerted of new posts via email but will soon be able to subscribe to RSS feeds.