September 17, 2026
Don’t Wait for the Retirement Party. Capture What Your Most Experienced Employees Know Now.
How Training Within Industry (TWI) helps manufacturers capture critical knowledge and build a more capable workforce
When an experienced employee retires, a manufacturer loses more than a person. Years—sometimes decades—of knowledge can walk out the door with them. Much of that knowledge has never been written down: the details that keep quality consistent, what to watch for when something doesn’t look right, and how to handle situations that don’t happen every day.
According to Jay Jochman, WMEP Consultant, manufacturers are increasingly recognizing the risk. “A lot of people with a lot of knowledge are retiring,” Jay says. “And many companies aren’t capturing all that knowledge.” For manufacturers already struggling to find skilled workers and bring new employees up to speed, losing that experience makes the workforce challenge even harder.
Institutional Knowledge Is Valuable—Until It Walks Out the Door
In many manufacturing environments, critical knowledge has traditionally been passed from one employee to another through on-the-job training. But manufacturers may have fewer experienced employees available to train others, while growth and retirements create pressure to get new hires productive faster.
The result is a challenge Jay hears from manufacturers: We have smart people. We just can’t teach them fast enough. That becomes especially difficult when the knowledge needed to do the job isn’t captured. “When that knowledge isn’t documented, a lot of the quality and attention to detail can be lost,” Jay says.
Shadowing an Experienced Employee Isn’t Enough
Pairing a new employee with an experienced operator for a week or two is common. But that doesn’t necessarily expose someone to everything they need to know. “Not every scenario occurs within those two weeks,” Jay explains. A quality problem may only occur occasionally. A machine may behave differently with another product. An experienced employee may make an adjustment automatically without realizing the new employee doesn’t understand why. That’s the risk of relying primarily on institutional knowledge: experienced employees often know more than they realize they need to teach.
Make Critical Knowledge Teachable
TWI gives manufacturers a structured way to capture critical job knowledge and teach the work to others consistently. By breaking a job into important steps, identifying key points, and explaining the reasons behind them, manufacturers can turn what experienced employees know into a repeatable approach to training. The goal isn’t simply to document the work—it’s to make that knowledge transferable, helping maintain quality and reduce variation as new employees learn the job.
Know What Your Workforce Knows
Manufacturers also need to understand where critical knowledge resides across the workforce. Jay encourages manufacturers to use a training matrix to identify the skills required, who is qualified to perform particular jobs, and where additional training is needed. He sometimes asks manufacturers a simple question: Who can run this machine? The answer isn’t always clear. “It’s hard to know who to train if you don’t know what they know,” Jay says. A training matrix makes those capabilities visible, helping manufacturers identify dependencies on experienced employees, prioritize cross-training, and prepare for retirements before they create an operational problem.
Bottom Line: Capture the Knowledge Before It Leaves
You can prevent critical knowledge from leaving the company when experienced employees retire—but you need to act before they do. Identify where your organization depends heavily on institutional knowledge, who holds that knowledge, and where skill gaps exist. Then create a structured way to capture and transfer what your experienced employees know. The best time to preserve decades of manufacturing knowledge isn’t during someone’s final week on the job—it’s while they’re still there to teach it.