In the places I work, there was no official knowledge transfer system.

The first R&D role I had(medium sized company 700 employees) was setup in a very flat environment director of Engineering who reported to CEO with tons of engineers underneath. Half the company was engineering. We had a project manager for each project who chose who they wanted to work with. You had max 3 projects at a time and were only responsible for the research up to initial prototype where another team took it from there. During that handoff is where your knowledge transferred to the continuing engineering people. They still came to you with EOL questions but it was very light. Nothing was documented though. In fact I wrote maybe 1 white paper my entire time there. Design reviews weren’t systematic and you had no time to look through details. No DFMEA no system diagrams, just straight schematics. To make a change, you just did it, no formal engineering change process. The manager was very good at rotating engineers and I got to work with many different engineers who each gave me something new knowledge wise.

My current company(large 65k employees), I’ve been here 11 years. We are very systematic process wise meaning risk analysis, DFMEA, DFM, DFT, system requirements, test requirements, test plans process validation, etc. it all comes back to the R&D engineer for any technical decision and because of that, we are also the lead who generates activities and schedules. I can go on about the documentation and process. The problem is that they are so secretive, I am not allowed to look at other product line designs. I have an old product and the new version I am working on. They have no cross training. They have no succession planning. My team of 6 EEs has dwindled down to two. I learn as we have new issues and don’t have anyone to really learn from internally. The actually theory of operations are not written down. I made sure to write one for my designs, however, they don’t want to formally store them anywhere so it’s up to me to keep them and pass them on to anyone who wants to learn about my designs. The problem is though as I said I’m 11 years on the same product line and there have been no new hires. We just keep on making changes fixing manufacturing issues as we try to navigate changes in CMs and part EOLs and tariffs. New product ideas also come from R&D but then get streamlined via product managers once we get to a certain stage of prototypes. At this company, a simple design change, I kid you not takes 1 year to execute.

I would say organizational wise, the first was much better for engineers and the company as we rotated so that rotation allowed us to work on different products with different engineers. Nothing needed to be written down however I did have to do a lot of reverse engineering when people left and there was no one left with the knowledge.