The Knowledge Gap: What Happens to Your Manufacturing IT When Your Most Experienced People Retire

About 25% of the manufacturing workforce is 55 or older right now. Deloitte estimates 2.6 million people will retire from manufacturing over the next decade. A recent NAM survey shows 97% of manufacturers are worried about it.

Most of the industry conversation is about filling the headcount gap — how to recruit the next generation of workers, how to make manufacturing attractive to younger candidates. That’s a real problem. But it’s not the problem that keeps me up at night.

What concerns me more is the knowledge gap.

The Guy Who’s Been There 22 Years

I’ve been in food plants where one person has been there for two decades and is the only one who knows why a specific network drop in the packaging area was set up the way it was. Or why a particular switch has a configuration exception that nobody documented. Or why traffic from a certain machine gets routed in an unusual way that was a workaround for something that happened in 2011.

He retires. And suddenly the next person who touches that network has no context for any of it. They see an unusual configuration and they don’t know if it’s intentional or a mistake. They make a change to “clean things up.” Something breaks. And now there’s an outage that nobody can explain because the person who would have known why it was set up that way is in Florida.

This isn’t hypothetical. I have seen this exact scenario play out.

It’s a Documentation Problem, Not a People Problem

Up to 70% of critical undocumented knowledge is at risk of being lost when experienced workers retire. Human error-related downtime — often caused by people who simply lack the context the previous person had — costs U.S. manufacturers an estimated $92 billion annually.

And it’s not limited to IT. It’s the maintenance tech who knows the workaround for that one conveyor. The quality manager who has the relationship with every co-man vendor. The plant manager who remembers why a process changed in 2014 and what happened the last time someone tried to change it back.

The common thread: critical decisions were made, and the rationale was never captured. The “what” exists somewhere — in a configuration file, a process document, a procedure manual. The “why” exists only in one person’s head.

What Good Documentation Looks Like in a Manufacturing IT Context

For IT and network infrastructure specifically, the documentation that matters most is the documentation that explains decisions, not just configurations. A network diagram is useful. A network diagram with a note that says “this VLAN was created in 2019 to isolate the packaging line SCADA after the vendor required network separation for remote access” is invaluable.

The categories worth capturing:

• Non-standard configurations and why they exist. If something is set up in a way that would look wrong to someone new, document the reason.
• Vendor relationships and access credentials. Who has remote access to what systems, under what circumstances, and who to call when something breaks.
• Dependency mapping. Which systems depend on which other systems. What breaks if the network switch in server room 2 goes offline for 20 minutes.
• Historical decisions. Why a particular platform was chosen over the alternative, what problems it was solving, and what the known limitations are.

None of this is complicated to capture. It’s just not urgent — until someone retires, and suddenly it’s a crisis.

The Fix Is Getting Started Before It’s Too Late

The right time to document your infrastructure was ten years ago. The second best time is now, while the people who built it are still available to explain it. Most plants are better at maintaining their equipment than maintaining their knowledge. The first requires a physical act; the second just requires intentionality.

If you have people in your organization who are 5–10 years from retirement and carry institutional knowledge about your network or systems, a structured documentation exercise with them is one of the highest-ROI IT investments you can make.

NBIT helps manufacturers document and standardize their IT infrastructure — not just for day-to-day operations, but so that knowledge transfers when people do. Talk to us if this is something you’re thinking about.