Your best machinist is retiring in six months.

She's been on the floor for thirty years. She knows which machine sounds wrong before it breaks down. She can troubleshoot the tricky setup on Line 3 that no one else seems to get right. She remembers why you stopped using that supplier in 2015. She's got workarounds for half a dozen problems that aren't written down anywhere.

What happens to all of that when she walks out the door?

A Crisis Already Underway

This isn't about one person. One in three UK workers is now aged 50 or older, and in some manufacturing trades, nearly half the workforce is over 50. Make UK's Industrial Strategy Skills Commission describes it as a "perfect storm": increased early retirement, an ageing workforce, and elevated occupational ill-health hitting the sector hard.

This isn't a future problem. It's happening right now.

It's being called the "silver tsunami." When a third of your most experienced workforce leaves over the next few years, you're facing more than a recruitment challenge. People are leaving, and they're taking decades of accumulated expertise with them.

What Actually Leaves With Them

Replacing someone with three years of experience is manageable. Train someone new, get them up to speed, move forward.

Someone with thirty years is different. They've seen every problem twice. They know which solutions actually work on your specific equipment, not just in theory. They can diagnose issues by sound, by smell, by the way a machine vibrates.

More importantly, they know the why. Why you run this process at a slightly lower temperature than the manual suggests. Why you check this measurement twice on Fridays. Why that valve needs replacing every six months even though the spec says annually.

None of that is written down. It was learned through years of watching things go wrong, fixing them, and remembering. Your SOPs tell people what to do. Your experienced workers know what actually works. There's a massive gap between those two things.

Why Traditional Knowledge Transfer Fails

So manufacturers try to bridge that gap. They know retirements are coming. They attempt knowledge transfer. But here's where it breaks down.

Documentation projects stall out.
You ask your veteran to "write down what you know." They sit at a computer for an hour, write three pages, and give up. It's overwhelming. They don't know where to start. They're not writers. And honestly, they don't know what's important to document because to them, it's all just obvious.

Shadowing runs out of time.
You pair junior and senior workers together. It helps, but it's slow. You can only shadow one person at a time. If your expert is retiring in six months, you're trying to transfer thirty years of knowledge in half a year. The maths doesn't work. And shadowing shows people what to do, not why it matters or what to do when things go wrong.

Exit interviews capture almost nothing.
By the time someone's leaving, they're mentally out the door. You get a rushed conversation, some hastily written notes. Maybe they remember to mention the big stuff. The subtle judgment calls? The situational knowledge? The pattern recognition they've developed? None of that surfaces in an hour-long meeting.

The traditional approaches fail because they're trying to extract knowledge at the wrong time, in the wrong format, under time pressure.

The Actual Solution: Continuous Capture

Here's what needs to happen instead. Stop treating knowledge transfer as a project that happens before retirement. Treat it as an ongoing process that happens during normal work.

Your experienced people already transfer knowledge every day. They explain things to colleagues. They talk through problems. They answer questions. That's how knowledge actually moves between people on the floor.

The missing piece is capture. Those conversations happen and then they're gone. Six months later, someone has the same question and there's no one left to ask.

So capture them. Record the conversation. Transcribe it. Make it searchable. When your operator explains why they set up the machine a certain way, that explanation should be available to everyone who needs it, not just the person standing there that day.

This isn't about asking people to do extra work. It's about preserving the knowledge transfer that's already happening.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The technology exists. You can record a fifteen-minute conversation, transcribe it automatically, and make it searchable alongside your existing documentation.

Your best operator is troubleshooting a recurring issue. Someone asks them how they diagnose it. They explain: "I listen for this sound, check this gauge, and if those two things line up, it's usually the valve. But on machine 4 specifically, you also need to check the pressure sensor because it runs slightly hot."

Record that. Transcribe it. Now when someone else encounters that issue in two years, they can search for it and find the answer. Not buried in a folder. Not lost when that operator retired. Searchable, findable, usable.

This is what we built Promptable to do. Our knowledge capture feature lets you record conversations with your experts, automatically transcribes them, and makes them searchable alongside your documentation. When someone has a question, they get an answer with context, with the expertise of the people who built your operation.

We're not saying "replace your people with AI." We're saying capture what your people know while they're still here to explain it.

The Window Is Narrowing

Make UK reports that more than half of manufacturers expect between 6-20% of their workforce to retire over the next decade. If you've got experienced workers approaching retirement, you don't have years to figure this out.

Start now. Not when they hand in their notice. Not in the exit interview. Now, while they're still doing the work, while the knowledge is fresh, while they're still around to answer follow-up questions.

Your best operators built your business. Their expertise is one of your most valuable assets.

Don't let it walk out the door.