In September we took on twelve apprentices across IT, transport planning and finance, most of them eighteen or nineteen. In their first fortnight the service desk noticed a pattern. A planning apprentice saved a route plan to the computer and could not find it again. A finance apprentice asked how to get back to a spreadsheet she had been working on the day before. Several asked where the documents were kept, and seemed puzzled by the answer.
They were not careless, and they were quick with everything else. They had grown up with phones and online services where you search for things and the application remembers where they are. None of them had ever needed a structure of folders inside folders, and some had never seen one.
That matters more than it sounds, because a good deal of our control over information depends on where people put it. Retention is applied by location. Permissions are inherited from the team site a file sits in. Our records policy assumes that staff file a contract in the contracts library. When a file is saved wherever the application suggests, usually a personal area or the downloads folder, it falls outside all of that. When we checked a sample of documents created by staff under twenty five in the last year, about forty percent sat outside any team site at all.
I do not think this is a gap in their education that induction can close. Within ten years most of the people we employ will work this way, and so will many who are older and have simply stopped navigating. Any control that relies on people choosing the right place will fail quietly, one file at a time.
So we are moving the decision away from where a file is saved. Retention and sensitivity are increasingly applied by labels and by the kind of document, recognised from its content, rather than by folder. Each role's default save location is now its team site, so doing nothing puts a file in the right place. Search across team sites has been improved, because that is how these colleagues will look for anything. Induction does include twenty minutes on where work lives, but we no longer rely on it.
For thirty years we have organised information by where people put it. The people joining us now organise it by how they find it, and our controls will have to follow them.
– Serguey Shinder
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