The Manufacturing Skills Gap Isn’t a People Problem
Every manufacturing conference I attend, I hear the same panic: “We can’t find skilled people.”
Executives call it the “Silver Tsunami.” The veteran experts are retiring, taking 30 years of tribal knowledge out the door with them, and the new generation coming in doesn’t have the skills to replace them.
So, companies spend millions on recruiting. They fight over a shrinking pool of “qualified” candidates.
But what if the “Skills Gap” is actually just a lazy excuse?
The problem isn’t that young workers aren’t capable. The problem is that we are still training them like it’s 1990.
The "Shadowing" Trap
For decades, the standard for industrial training was simple: “Go follow Sarah for six weeks.”
Sarah is your master technician. She’s brilliant, she knows every hum and rattle of the line, but she’s also busy. She doesn’t want a shadow. And even if she is a great teacher, reliance on human-to-human transmission is slow, inconsistent, and expensive.
When Sarah retires, the training manual walks out the door with her.
“
We’re already demonstrating the effectiveness of Manifest in enhancing accuracy, consistency, and operational efficiency for clients including British Airways and the U.S. Army, Navy, and Airforce, and Hololight will take us to the next level with customers like these.
The Hololgiht streaming integration aims to boost workers’ accessibility to AR instructional tools regardless of their location and bandwidth.
Florian Haspinger, CEO of Hololight, also added:
Experience is Overrated
That sounds controversial, but hear me out.
We value “10 years of experience” because, historically, it took 10 years to memorize every quirk of a complex machine.
But in the age of AI and digital work instructions, memorization is obsolete.
If you can provide step-by-step directions, videos, and annotated photos, highlighting exactly which bolt to turn and to what torque, you remove the cognitive load. You don’t need an operator who has memorized the manual. You need an operator who can follow a perfect, visual guide.
The New Paradigm: Just-in-Time Expertise
We need to stop training for “Just-in-Case” (learning everything in a classroom just in case you need it) and start enabling for “Just-in-Time” (getting the info the second you need it).
Tools like Manifest allow you to capture Sarah’s expertise once, recording her voice, her movements, her notes, her expertise, and scale it to 3 or 10 or 20 new hires instantly.
The result? A new hire can perform at an expert level in days, not years.
The Takeaway
Stop waiting for the labor market to magically produce thousands of 20-year veterans. They aren’t coming.
Instead, look at your tooling. If you give the current workforce the right digital tools, you’ll realize the talent was there all along, you just weren’t equipping them to succeed.
Closing the skills gap with embedded knowledge
The industrial skills gap isn’t just about hiring. It’s about knowledge transfer.
AI-powered digital work instructions capture expertise at the moment it’s demonstrated, not months later in a conference room. They:
- Preserve institutional knowledge
- Reduce dependence on a small number of experts
- Standardize execution across shifts and sites
- Support continuous improvement as processes evolve
For manufacturing engineers and operations leaders, this means fewer deviations, higher quality, and greater resilience.
Ready to Fix Training, Not Fight the Labor Market?
If the skills gap is a training problem, the next step is understanding what modern training actually looks like.
👉 Download the Manifest® Platform Overview
See how digital work instructions capture expert knowledge once and scale it across your workforce.
Still figuring out where to start?
➡️ Talk to an expert
Have a real conversation about your training challenges and what it would take to modernize them.
Ready to Equip Your Frontline Workforce?
Start your digital transformation journey today with Taqtile. Choose the path that’s right for your organization.
