The Manufacturing Skills Gap

Your tenured subject matter experts have spent decades building their knowledge and guiding less experienced members of the workforce. They’ve grown familiar with the day-to-day workflows of your organization, and they’ve experienced firsthand the increasing complexity of products and processes along the way. Manufacturers rely heavily on those experts to not only do their jobs, but to also contribute to the onboarding, training, and upskilling of the broader workforce—a gap that can’t easily be filled once they retire. The few SMEs you have must put their own tasks on hold to help their peers or new hires on the job, and this may be their only available method for knowledge sharing. Much of this knowledge resides only in the heads of the experts, making it impossible to scale it out across the organization effectively. With no clear method to capture that knowledge, their years' worth of accumulated experience leaves the business with them.

With a heavy reliance on experienced members of the workforce to lend support on the job, new hires have limited means to build expertise after SMEs leave the organization. Paper-based training materials and work instructions are notoriously difficult to keep up to date and can be hundreds of pages long, making it difficult for new frontline workers to find the information they need to complete a task efficiently. And once they find the right page, the worker is likely to struggle with the lack of visual context, the 2D diagrams describing 3D equipment, and the complex information.

As products and processes become more complex and the number of product variations and configurations increases year after year, frontline workers face the growing pressure to keep up and hit production KPIs. But this complexity makes it even more difficult to navigate complicated paper-based instructions without over-the-shoulder support from an expert. In-person training programs can offer information and guidance, but frontline workers must rely on recall to use that information on the job later.

Education and training programs can be helpful ways to onboard employees and share information about new changes. But classroom experiences can lack hands-on learning, and don’t always translate well to the plant floor, where a frontline worker must rely on paper-based work instructions or interrupt an SME to fill any gaps in their memory. New hires and experienced workers alike need a way to access the information they need while on the job.

Outdated and negative perceptions of frontline work make it difficult for manufacturers to attract and retain talent as their experts retire from the workforce. Further adding to this negative perception is the reliance on paper-based training materials and work instructions in manufacturing, which can put off digital natives—the incoming generation of workers who grew up around technology—from considering roles in the industry.