The Great Documentation Brain Drain: What Happens When Our Experts All Retire?

A looming expertise gap in tech docs requires mentorship, leadership growth, and strategic investment

A few years ago, I attended a technical writing conference where a panel of well-known documentation consultants held court. They spoke with the confidence of people who had seen dark things like entire documentation systems erased by an intern who "didn't think it would actually delete." They debated metadata strategies the way some people argue about politics at Thanksgiving. The kind of deep, expert-level discussion that makes you feel both inspired and slightly inadequate.

But looking around the room, I noticed something unsettling. Most of these experts who shaped how documentation is done in the modern age were in their late fifties, sixties, or even seventies. Some had already started scaling back, slipping into partial retirement, consulting "only on projects that truly interest me" (translation: no, I will not fix your broken website again).

And that's when it hit me: What happens when they all retire simultaneously?

Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash

Unwritten Rulebooks (No One Bothered to Write Down)

For decades, these folks have been the unofficial keepers of the industry. They're the ones who fought for structured content before anyone even knew what that meant. They convinced entire companies that documentation should be more than a last-minute Word doc someone slaps together at 4:59 PM on a Friday.

They are the people who:

• Invented the standards we take for granted.

• Wrote the books we pretend we've read.

• Taught the courses that made us believe we could actually do this job.

But here's the problem: so much of their expertise lives in their heads. And those heads are dangerously close to being retired and relocated to a beach somewhere, never to be troubled by another information architecture crisis.

The 'Figure It Out Yourself' Future

If you think about it, the technical documentation industry is oddly fragile. Companies often don't invest in documentation until something goes horribly wrong—like a software release so unintelligible that the support team quits en masse.

Now imagine that, on top of that, all of the industry's best consultants and educators vanish.

Who steps in to:

• Train the next generation of documentation leaders?

• Convince CEOs that investing in structured content is worth it?

• Stop a well-meaning but disastrously uninformed team from using Microsoft Excel as a knowledge base?

It's not that there aren't younger people in the industry—we don't have nearly enough of them in leadership positions. Right now, a frightening number of companies rely on a single documentation expert to hold things together, and that person's retirement is, at best, a vague "someday" that no one plans for.

The Mass Exodus: A Crisis in Waiting

Picture this: a year from now, a dozen of the most well-known documentation experts simultaneously retire. Suddenly, there's a void. Companies that rely on these experts for training and strategy start scrambling. Who else understands content governance at scale? Who else can convince a room full of executives that documentation is a business asset, not a cost center?

It's like waking up one day and realizing all the plumbers have retired, and now you're stuck with an overflowing toilet, a YouTube tutorial, and a wrench.

Why We Should Panic (But in a Productive Way)

Before we start accepting our bleak, documentation-free future, let's talk about what we can do:

1. We need structured knowledge transfer.

   • Veteran experts should be mentoring new professionals, writing down their battle-tested strategies, and ensuring they don't take their expertise to the grave (or, you know, to a retirement community in Florida).

2. We need to make documentation leadership attractive to younger professionals.

   • Now, becoming a documentation consultant is like becoming a jazz musician—respected by a niche audience but not a mainstream career choice. We need to change that.

3. Companies need to realize that an expert-level documentation strategy is not replaceable.

   • Organizations should hire documentation specialists before the last experts leave, not after realizing the product is unusable without them.

A Retirement Party We Can't Afford to Ignore

Technical documentation as an industry is at a crossroads. If we don't invest in the next generation of experts—consultants, educators, and documentation strategists—we're looking at a future where companies try to automate away problems they don't fully understand, and the only available documentation training is a two-hour webinar hosted by someone who just discovered Markdown last week.

So, if you're an industry veteran, here's my plea: write it all down before you retire. Mentor someone. Record a video explaining why metadata matters. Start a blog. Write a book (or three). Please do something to ensure that when you finally sign off for good, the rest aren't left googling "How to create a sustainable documentation strategy " and getting a bunch of AI-generated nonsense in return.

Otherwise, the future of tech comm might be one long, desperate, less-than-helpful Slack thread.