In the context of demographic change and labour shortages that are challenging the European VET-organizations and their workforce, VET-organizations are at risk of losing their critical working and educational knowledge just at a time when the systems and economies need to develop greater expertise and provide high quality education. Terms of a VET-knowledge collapse describe the potential impact of the loss and deterioration of valuable skills, experience and know-how so important for high-quality VET-education. Research emphasizes the impact knowledge loss can have, that it is ‘the single most costly source of (knowledge) mismanagement in the corporate world’ and that not capturing knowledge before it walks out the door can result in costly and a detrimental set-backs rendering any attempts to increase efficiency in VET useless. However, before initiating and conducting DESK, no well established and easy to access tools to manage or retain knowledge existed for VET-institutions. The eight DESK consortium partners were carefully selected from 4 different countries and VET-systems. Additionally, not only vocational schools were incorporated but also universities and teacher-training organizations with well established contacts to local ministries to other VET-stakeholders. The coordinating partner, the Landesakademie Esslingen, has experience in managing international projects and organizes a variety of in-service teacher trainings. It is also responsible for human-resource development of educational, managerial staff and teachers with special tasks in vocational schools in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The two Bulgarian universities are internationally recognized research and teacher-training organizations. The vocational school partners from Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Bulgaria represented a great variety of different educational settings from technical colleges to clothing and design schools and with quite different organizational objectives. All school partners have had previous difficulties with knowledge loss due to leaving staff and are aware of the pending threat of the aging workforce. Regional teams were created in which the teacher training organizations contributed to methodological tasks and the vocational schools provided practical insights and testing opportunities. To increase the awareness of stakeholders in the VET-system and to provide support and guidelines DESK developed tools, evaluated measures and created best practice examples of knowledge management and retention in VET-organizations. The collected experiences and lessons learned have been summarized, structured and put in the framework of national partner guides and a Handbook for knowledge management and retention in VET. The results and experiences will support organizations to retain knowledge and to set up processes and activities to facilitate the active exchange of knowledge from those who are willing to share with those who are eager to apply. With the idea of more and more European VET-organisations actively engaging in knowledge management projects, more and more organizations start recognising and appreciating the value of the organizational memory and ‘know-how’ of their experienced employees. This will be one of the factors to initiate the cultural change needed to maintain long-term employability and continuity of the know-how of the aging workforce.Over the duration of the three year project the partners continually optimized their ideas and realized effects for students, teachers and for the partner organization. Considering the variety of project types and the highly diverse partners, educational contexts and starting points the effects were manifold and ranged from the change of the relationship between students and teachers and improved learning outcomes and learning conditions to new perspective on management opportunities that combine strategic development of the school with the risk and resource management of critical knowledge. All of the projects will be continued and local collaborations have been formed to disseminate the ideas and findings.Additionally, the DESK-partners have been able to start first initiatives of system-integrated knowledge-life-cycle-management processes that will hopefully not only guarantee the knowledge continuity of the VET-organizations but also the sustainable employability; it will also increase the loyalty of talented, motivated teachers with their industry credibility and teaching experience. The initial steps have been taken, but it will take time to convince the stakeholders in the VET-systems to initiate the necessary changes.