Manufacturing Day is designed to help the next generation see what a career in manufacturing can actually look like. This is increasingly important as manufacturers aren’t only competing for customers and production capacity, they’re competing for talent. At the same time, many of the industry’s most experienced employees are getting closer to retirement.
This creates a difficult transition: manufacturers need to attract younger workers while finding better ways to transfer decades of operational knowledge to them.
MFG Day helps address the first part by increasing awareness. Manufacturers also need to think about what happens after someone decides to join the industry. How quickly can a new employee learn? Can they easily find the information they need? Can they contribute to solving problems? And when an experienced employee leaves, how much of their knowledge stays behind?
Digital tools can’t solve the manufacturing skills gap on their own. But they can help manufacturers address some of these questions.
Here are five ways.
1. Capture operational knowledge before it walks out the door
A significant amount of manufacturing knowledge isn’t contained in an SOP.
It’s knowing what to check when a machine produces a particular defect. It’s remembering how a similar problem was solved six months ago. It’s understanding the small adjustments that make a process run reliably.
Much of this knowledge is transferred informally between experienced and less experienced employees. That becomes a risk as experienced workers retire and younger employees move between roles and companies more frequently.
Digital tools can make capturing this knowledge part of everyday work rather than a separate documentation exercise.
For example, information from a resolved production issue can become a lesson learned. Photos and videos can be incorporated into a One Point Lesson. A successful corrective action can be documented and made searchable for another team.
The objective isn’t to document everything an experienced employee knows. It’s to make valuable knowledge easier to retain when it matters.
2. Give newer employees faster access to the right information
Capturing knowledge only helps if people can actually find it. Manufacturing documentation is often spread across paper binders, shared drives, SharePoint folders, emails, and the knowledge of individual employees.
For someone who has worked at a facility for 20 years, navigating that environment may be second nature. For someone who started three months ago, it isn’t.
Digitizing standards, lessons learned, and operating knowledge can reduce that dependency on knowing where information lives, or knowing the right person to ask.
The location of that information matters too. A work instruction accessible through a QR code next to a machine is different from a 40-page document stored several folders deep on a shared drive.
The closer information gets to the point of use, the easier it becomes for employees to apply it.
3. Make problem-solving more collaborative
One misconception about digitization is that it’s primarily about moving paper processes onto screens. The bigger opportunity is often changing how information flows.
Consider a recurring production problem. In a traditional environment, an operator might flag it to a supervisor. The team discusses it during a meeting. Someone investigates. A corrective action is taken. Perhaps an email or report documents the outcome. Then, six months later, another shift or another plant encounters the same problem.
Digital operational tools can connect those steps. Operators can surface issues as they happen. Teams can collaborate around the problem. Corrective actions can be tracked. Once the problem is resolved, the learning can be captured and shared.
This also gives frontline employees a more direct role in continuous improvement. They’re not simply receiving instructions. They’re contributing observations, knowledge, and solutions.
4. Turn local improvements into organizational learning
Manufacturers with multiple lines, shifts, or sites face another knowledge problem: good ideas don’t necessarily travel.
One facility solves an issue that another facility encountered last year. One team develops a better standard, while another continues using the old approach. A safety incident generates an important lesson, but only the people at that facility hear about it.
Digital tools make it easier to distribute relevant knowledge across organizational boundaries. That doesn’t mean every piece of information should be sent to everyone. The goal is to identify useful knowledge, structure it, and deliver it to the teams for whom it’s relevant.
Over time, this can create an important shift: problem-solving becomes a source of organizational knowledge rather than a series of isolated events.
Instead of solving the same problem repeatedly, manufacturers can build on what their teams have already learned.
5. Give employees modern tools for modern manufacturing
Modern plants combine automation, data, engineering, technology, skilled trades, and human problem-solving. The Manufacturing Institute specifically encourages manufacturers to show students these aspects of the industry and the range of careers behind them.
The tools employees use every day are part of that experience. For younger employees accustomed to finding information instantly and collaborating digitally, processes based heavily on paper, spreadsheets, email chains, and tribal knowledge can create unnecessary friction.
Digitization doesn’t mean introducing technology everywhere simply because a newer tool exists. It means looking at where technology can make work simpler: finding information, communicating across shifts, escalating problems, learning a new process, sharing an improvement, or understanding what needs attention.
Those improvements benefit younger employees, but they’re not exclusively about younger employees. A simpler way to access a standard helps everyone. A better way to capture a lesson learned helps everyone. And a faster way to understand and solve recurring problems ultimately helps the operation.
From attracting the next generation to transferring knowledge
MFG Day is an opportunity for manufacturers to show young people the breadth of careers available to them. But attracting the next generation is only one side of the workforce challenge.
Manufacturers also need to consider how knowledge will move from one generation to the next, and whether their operating systems make that transfer easier or harder. The goal isn’t to replace experienced workers’ knowledge with software. The opportunity is to use digital tools to make that experience easier to capture, easier to share, and easier for the next person to build upon.
That’s particularly relevant as experienced employees approach retirement and a new generation begins building its own manufacturing careers.
For manufacturers, preparing for that transition is becoming an important part of staying competitive.
