Every plant has a technician who knows the third press on line two needs an extra 30 seconds of warm-up. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody had to, because she has been there for 25 years.
Now think about the operator she trained last year. There's a good chance he won't be there in three years. Some of what she taught him leaves when she retires. The rest leaves when he takes a job at another plant.
Manufacturers have spent years preparing for the retirement wave. Turnover drains the same knowledge, and it happens every month.
Two ways knowledge walks out
Retirement is the slow exit. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project that U.S. manufacturers could need as many as 3.8 million new employees between 2024 and 2033. If the skills gap holds, 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled.
Turnover is the fast exit. The median manufacturing worker has been with their current employer for 4.9 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' January 2026 tenure data. Across all industries, workers 55 to 64 have a median of 9.6 years with their employer. Workers 25 to 34 have 3.0.
In August 2026 alone, 197,000 manufacturing workers quit their jobs, according to the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Some leave the industry. Others go to a competitor down the road and take what they learned on your equipment with them.
The veteran who trains a new hire brings 20 years of context. The new hire may stay three. If the knowledge lives only in his head, you pay to train his replacement from scratch. Every departure resets the clock, and the veterans who can restart it are retiring.
Where knowledge loss shows up
- Maintenance. Technicians spend time tracking down equipment history before they can diagnose a failure. A vendor who has never seen the asset may need a site visit just to scope the problem.
- Facilities. Record drawings drift from the building with every moved wall and relocated panel. Capital projects hit the mismatch mid-project, when changes cost the most.
- Layout. The reasons a line sits where it does often live with the engineer who placed it, and that engineer may have left two jobs ago.
- Training. With high turnover, your most experienced people spend more of each year training replacements and less of it running production.
These costs end up as downtime. Siemens' True Cost of Downtime 2024 report found that unplanned downtime costs the world's 500 largest companies almost $1.4 trillion a year, equal to 11% of their revenue. In automotive plants, one lost hour now costs $2.3 million.
Turnover also raises safety risk, because every departure puts a new person on the floor. Ontario's Institute for Work & Health found that workers in their first month on the job filed four times as many lost-time claims as workers with more than a year of tenure.
Why SOPs and CMMS records fall short
Most plants rely on standard operating procedures (SOPs), a maintenance management system (CMMS) and facility drawings. An SOP tells a new hire to check the pressure gauge. It doesn't tell them what a slightly off reading means. A CMMS logs repairs but leaves out the setting a technician learned runs better than spec.
All three lose location. "Check the panel behind the compressor" means little in a building with a hundred similar panels. Stand in front of the right one and the instruction is obvious. Knowledge tied to a place has to be captured in that place.
A four-step plan to capture expertise
- Find where the knowledge lives. Identify the people everyone calls when something breaks. Look for lines that run better on certain shifts, or quality issues that appear only when one person is out. Include mid-career specialists, since competitors are recruiting them too.
- Rank by risk. Safety-critical processes come first, then knowledge held by someone close to retirement or likely to leave. A skill only one person has outranks a skill three people share.
- Capture the reasoning. Record how an expert diagnoses a problem along with the fix. Do it at the equipment, with the expert explaining what they look and listen for.
- Store it with the plant, then teach it. Put what you capture into a shared record first. Then pair mentors with new hires and run teach-back sessions. When that hire moves on, the record stays.
Giving that knowledge a place to live
A digital twin, a dimensionally accurate 3D model of the facility, gives that knowledge a home. With Matterport, plant teams capture a facility and attach knowledge to the exact spot where it applies. A technician can add a Tag to a pump with its manual, its repair history and the warm-up quirk nobody wrote down. An engineer can note why a line sits where it does.
Guided Tours walk new hires and contractors through the plant in the order a veteran would, before they reach the floor. You build a tour once and use it for every hire after that. Vendors and bidding contractors can review equipment and site conditions remotely, which cuts site visits and escort time. When a section of the plant changes, teams rescan that area and update the model.
Mentors still matter at the machine. The digital twin keeps what they know in the plant whether they retire after 30 years or the person they trained leaves after three.
Start before the next two-week notice
Retirements give you warning. Resignations usually give you two weeks. Pick one line, one building system or one hard-to-replace expert and run the four steps now.
See how manufacturers use digital twins to keep plant knowledge in the building. Talk to a Matterport expert.
Sources
- Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, "Manufacturers Need as Many as 3.8 Million New Employees by 2033," April 3, 2024: https://themanufacturinginstitute.org/manufacturers-need-as-many-as-3-8-million-new-employees-by-2033/
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employee Tenure in 2026," September 24, 2026: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, August 2026 release, Table 4: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/jolts_09292026.htm
- Siemens, "The True Cost of Downtime 2024": https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf
- Institute for Work & Health, "Newness" and the risk of occupational injury:https://iwh.on.ca/node/1087
