By Marc Callert, National Business Director, Automotive Engineering, Kelly
I recently spoke with a manufacturer who lost 120 years of institutional knowledge across five people. All within a few months. Leadership knew the employees were late in their careers, so the retirements weren’t entirely a surprise. But nobody had put hard timelines on the conversation, and when the announcements came, they came all at once. Most of the final months were spent on vacation days and send-off lunches, not documentation. Then the knowledge walked out the door.
That story isn’t unusual, but what makes it urgent is the environment in which it’s happening. Advanced manufacturers are facing a retirement wave and an automation wave at the same time, and most succession planning strategies were built to handle one of those pressures, not both.
What follows is a look at why traditional succession planning is failing under that double pressure, where the knowledge transfer gap is hiding, and what proactive workforce planning looks like for manufacturers who want to act before the next retirement wave hits.
The old playbook assumed a slower clock
Succession planning in manufacturing has historically assumed stable job definitions and long runways. A senior technician trained a junior over several years, while a maintenance lead taught the quirks of a specific piece of equipment to whoever was next in line. The pipeline moved at roughly the same speed as the work.
Automation broke that model from two directions. It changed what the job requires, and it shortened the runway for teaching it. A production line now needs hybrid skills: legacy equipment intuition combined with fluency in sensor data from the automated cells that were bolted on five years ago. That hybrid skillset rarely exists in a single candidate, which is how manufacturers end up searching for what I think of as a purple unicorn with orange spots. The job description reflects everything the retiring employee quietly started doing over the years, including the two adjacent roles they’d absorbed along the way. No single hire is going to absorb all of that scope on day one.
The data paradox
Automation was supposed to capture what used to live in people’s heads. In reality, it has produced more information than most manufacturers know what to do with. Sensors generate a flood of data on every machine, every cycle, every anomaly, and the analysis capability to act on it is a separate investment many smaller and mid-market manufacturers haven’t made.
Meanwhile, the maintenance tech who could walk past a 30-year-old press and hear when something was about to fail hasn’t been replaced by a dashboard. The dashboard is sitting there, unread, while the tech retires.
I talk to manufacturers who balk at the cost of a $150,000 data scientist as if that number lives in a vacuum. It doesn’t. A single unplanned shutdown, a missed customer shipment, or a production penalty can exceed that salary several times over. The people who understood how to prevent those shutdowns are leaving, and the technology that was supposed to prevent them is only as good as the team reading its outputs.
What proactive planning actually looks like
To plan for the collision instead of reacting to it, manufacturers need to:
- Cross-train in both directions. A senior engineer with 25 years on mechanical systems can teach a younger colleague how to anticipate failures. A younger engineer who grew up on automated cells can teach the senior colleague how to interpret what the sensors are flagging.
- Invest in structured knowledge transfer before it becomes urgent. When a new piece of equipment comes online, a dedicated group takes advantage of the equipment vendor’s training offering, with an expectation that whoever attends will bring the knowledge back and share it. Pulling someone off the floor for three or four days feels like a nuisance in the moment, but losing that knowledge two years later when they leave is significantly more expensive.
- Build co-op pipelines years in advance. Some of our automotive customers bring in students as sophomores and juniors, cycle them through real production environments for two or three years, and hire them as full-time engineers the day they graduate. By graduation, those hires already have two or three years inside the organization’s systems, culture, and problems.
- Hire for instinct, not credentials. Engineers who thrive in advanced manufacturing tend to share a particular habit: they tinker on their own time. They wrench on cars in the driveway, fix electronics for fun, write code for personal projects. The instinct to take something apart to figure out how it wants to work is what production floors actually need, and it’s something a transcript can’t tell you about.
- Treat workplace culture as part of the succession plan itself. Culture rarely gets named in succession conversations, but it should. You can build the strongest cross-training program in the region, but if your organization has a reputation for burning people out — particularly in automation roles, where 60- and 70-hour weeks are common — your bench will keep emptying faster than you can fill it. Succession planning starts with being a place where skilled people want to come work, and stay. Every other tactic is downstream.
Building all five of these capabilities in-house is a tall order, especially for manufacturers operating with lean teams and tight budgets. That’s where a workforce partner earns its keep.
Where a workforce partner fits
Most manufacturers reach out to Kelly after the crisis has already landed. Someone has given notice, the backfill is impossible, and the request is for help finding a replacement in three weeks. We do that work. But the more useful engagement starts earlier, when no one is scrambling to fill a hole.
Kelly helps manufacturers build that earlier engagement in a few ways, including managed engineering services, co-op pipelines, and contract-to-hire programs. But developing a contractor bench is the most practical place to start. A handful of skilled technicians or engineers working alongside your team on a contract basis gives you a pipeline of people who already know your environment, your equipment, and your expectations. When a full-time role opens up, the conversion is fast and the risk is low. You’ve already seen the work. In baseball terms, you’re building your bullpen. Instead of staffing a rotation and hoping no one gets hurt, you’re building depth before you need it.
When an urgent need extends beyond replacing individual contributors, we can also plug consultants into your team or deliver solutions entirely, bringing in our experts to execute defined scopes of work while we take responsibility for delivery, resource management, and outcomes. This allows your internal team to stay focused on core priorities and hiring while critical engineering work continues to move forward.
Most manufacturers treat succession as a staffing question handled by HR in annual reviews and org charts. Really, it’s an operations risk, on par with equipment uptime and supply continuity, and it needs to be planned for in the same room, by the same people, on the same cadence.
The retirement wave is already here, and the automation wave is accelerating. Planning for both, together, is the work that separates the companies still running strong lines in 2035 from the ones stuck searching for unicorns.
Kelly
At Kelly® (Nasdaq: KELYA, KELYB), we don’t just understand the future of work, we’re defining it. For over 80 years, we’ve sourced specialized talent, built agile workforces, and shaped growth strategies for employers around the world. Today, our recruiting, outsourcing, and consulting services provide the talent and solutions organizations need to move faster and grow smarter. We deliver meaningful impact by connecting people to work that enriches their lives, and companies to people who drive innovation and growth. Each year, we place more than 375,000 job seekers in new roles spanning science, engineering, technology, telecom, education, manufacturing, and more. To learn more, visit www.kellyservices.com.