Engineering and manufacturing organisations are under increasing pressure to maintain productivity, safety, and quality while navigating skills shortages, retiring experts, and complex operational environments. Yet much of the knowledge required to keep systems running efficiently still lives in people’s heads — not in accessible, scalable systems.

As experienced engineers retire or move roles, critical operational knowledge is often lost. Processes go undocumented, training becomes inconsistent across sites, and new hires rely heavily on informal shadowing. This creates hidden risk: errors increase, downtime rises, and productivity becomes dependent on a shrinking pool of experts.

Industry research consistently highlights the scale of this issue:

• Studies referenced by Deloitte show that a significant proportion of the manufacturing workforce is approaching retirement age, increasing the risk of institutional knowledge loss.
• Research from World Economic Forum highlights skills gaps and knowledge transfer as critical threats to industrial productivity and resilience.
• Operational risk studies referenced by McKinsey & Company link inconsistent training and undocumented processes to higher error rates, safety incidents, and unplanned downtime.

Knowledge transfer in engineering environments often fails because:
• Expertise is passed on informally rather than systematically
• Training materials are static and quickly outdated
• Complex processes are difficult to explain without visual or spatial context
• Onboarding relies heavily on availability of senior staff
• Lessons learned are rarely captured or reused across sites

Forward-thinking engineering organisations are moving away from document-heavy training and towards experience-led knowledge preservation. By using immersive and interactive digital environments, they are capturing expert knowledge once and scaling it across teams, sites, and generations — without relying on constant human intervention.

1. Immersive Digital Twins for Process Understanding
Interactive digital representations of facilities, equipment, and workflows that allow teams to explore and understand complex systems safely.

2. Scenario-Based Operational Training
Training experiences built around real operational scenarios, faults, and edge cases — not idealised processes.

3. Expert Knowledge Capture & Replay
Capturing senior engineers’ decision-making and process knowledge in interactive formats that can be reused at scale.

4. Standardised Training Across Sites
Consistent, role-specific learning experiences delivered across multiple locations to reduce variability and risk.

5. Faster, Safer Onboarding
Reducing time-to-competence for new hires by allowing them to learn systems and procedures before working in live environments.

Organisations that treat knowledge as a strategic asset — rather than an informal by-product of experience — are better equipped to reduce risk, improve efficiency, and scale operations sustainably. Preserving expertise digitally ensures that critical knowledge outlives individual roles and supports long-term operational resilience.

Explore how immersive digital platforms are transforming knowledge transfer in engineering and manufacturing.