Retirement is inevitable. This is why HR departments exist: To find new workers and replace the veterans. While technical schools can churn out recruits with a reasonable knowledge of basic maintenance, they can’t replicate actual work experience.

Nowhere is this skill gap felt more acutely than in maintenance. The industrial sector as a whole is suffering from a skill gap crisis, with millions of positions vacant due to a lack of qualified candidates. This is why intra-organizational knowledge transfer is so vital for maintenance teams.

What is a knowledge transfer?

Departments and organizations acquire a ton of information over years and even decades of functioning. This includes data about processes, procedures, people, and physical assets.

Much of this knowledge is unique and irreplaceable. Although some of it might be well documented in files and databases, a lot of it is stored in the heads of the most experienced and skilled workers. Now, if employees stayed in the organization perpetually, this wouldn’t be alarming.

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