The knowledge walking out the door
Thousands of new people are joining the water industry to help deliver AMP8. At the same time, many of our most experienced people are getting ready to retire.
Are we talking about that gap? And more importantly, are we doing anything about it?
Across energy and utilities, more than 105,000 workers, around one in six of the workforce, are forecast to retire by 2030. Imagine that playing out in the Premier League. One in six experienced players retire and are replaced by people who have never kicked a ball. It would be madness, and yet that is the situation our industry finds itself in.
A contractor owner told me recently that three or four of his most senior people, each with him for over 20 years, will retire in the next two to five years. He knows their experience will be lost to the business for good. But he's busy firefighting: holding on to the people he has, constantly recruiting new entrants and trying to bridge the gap between experience and inexperience.
Meanwhile, AMP8 is bringing in thousands of new starters, many from other industries and at every stage of life. That's exciting. AMP8 is full of opportunity, and welcoming new entrants is essential to delivering it. So how do we equip them with the standards and knowledge they need? How do we reconcile an experienced workforce heading for retirement with a new workforce that has no industry experience?
We connect them.
Where the knowledge lives now
Many of the industry's most experienced people started on the tools and worked through almost every role. They know things that aren't written down anywhere.
Right now, that experience lives in someone's day to day. It gets passed on site to site, person to person, if it gets passed on at all. There are very few systems to capture their knowledge and the standards they have helped to shape.
When those people leave, their knowledge leaves with them, and it doesn't come back. The gap shows up as slipping standards, inconsistency and decisions made without the bigger picture. And there's a simpler question nobody can answer: who do we ask now?
Why knowledge doesn't get captured
Time, cost and ownership are part of it. But mostly, we don't recognise how valuable our people are. It's easy to believe projects deliver themselves, but they don't. People deliver projects.
Capturing knowledge costs time and money. Not capturing it costs more: mistakes, rework, fines and budgets overrun. You can't afford to let that experience go without capturing it.
What good looks like
This doesn't mean turning experienced people into full-time trainers. That's a different career.
Good means, first and foremost, recognising that back-to-basics training is essential for new entrants. It means creating resources that support knowledge transfer, and a culture where teams are coached and mentored by the right people. If we want a "get it right first time" culture, we need systems and resources that connect teams with standards, best practice and knowledge, and a clear chain of command that signposts who to ask and how.
Giving our most experienced people the chance to train, coach and mentor new entrants is one of the best ways to close the gap. Having systems that turn their knowledge into training resources future-proofs the business long after they've gone.
And you don't need 40 years' experience to have something worth passing on. Best practice keeps evolving and the goalposts keep moving, and teams are working out new ways of doing things together all the time. That knowledge needs capturing and standardising too, so the whole supply chain can work consistently.
The most important part of training isn't the telling, it's the dialogue. You can tell people the standards, but if they can't have a real conversation with someone who knows more than them, there's a gap nothing else will fix.
Show, don't tell
Much of this knowledge never gets passed on because a career's worth of experience is almost impossible to write down. A playbook tells you what. A video shows you how and why. So much context can be captured on film that simply can't fit on a page.
Start with one system
This isn't impossible. It's systems thinking, and it starts with your biggest pain point. What keeps you up at night? What keeps going wrong? Where does inconsistency show up? Pick one area, draw out the knowledge and context, and make it accessible to the people you want to teach. Speak in their language and leave no room for assumptions. That's how you get from inconsistency to a whole supply chain upholding the same standards on every site.
Don't let your most experienced people walk out of the industry before your new starters have had the chance to learn from them.
If you're not sure where to begin, ask yourself: who in your business holds knowledge you couldn't replace if they left tomorrow?
