Your Biggest Opportunity Is in Your Workforce
Your results point to strengthening the systems that help your maintenance team sustain performance and retain critical expertise as your workforce changes.
Fix the foundation to break the cycle
Don’t Let Critical Knowledge Walk Out the Door
Your results suggest that while your operation has a solid level of resilience, Skill/Team Gaps may be limiting your ability to sustain and improve maintenance performance. In most operations, this can show up in a few consistent ways:
- Critical knowledge is concentrated among a small number of experienced employees
- Skill gaps leave important maintenance responsibilities dependent on too few people
- Knowledge transfer and succession planning aren’t keeping pace with workforce changes
These gaps can make an operation more dependent on individual employees than the systems and processes supporting them.
Don’t panic: This does not mean your operation needs a full overhaul. It means your best opportunity is to strengthen how critical skills and knowledge are developed, shared and retained.
What the research tells us
Pro Services studied 55 manufacturing leaders to understand why recurring maintenance problems persist and what organizations that consistently improve reliability do differently.
The research identified several workforce challenges that can make it more difficult to sustain maintenance performance over time:
Build a Workforce That Can Sustain Performance
Identify where critical knowledge lives
Determine which equipment, processes and maintenance responsibilities depend heavily on one or two experienced employees, and where losing that expertise would create the greatest operational risk.
Make knowledge transfer part of the work
Create opportunities for experienced employees to share what they know through hands-on training, documentation and working alongside less-experienced team members.
Build the skills your operation will need next
Look beyond today's open positions and identify the technical skills and capabilities your maintenance team will need as equipment, technology and operations evolve.
had a workforce identified as thin or skill-gapped.
had critical maintenance knowledge concentrated in employees nearing retirement.
reported having no meaningful succession plan in place.
faced all three workforce risks at the same time.
Warning: Don’t assume hiring alone will solve the problem!
A stronger workforce takes more than adding headcount. Make sure your operation has the time and structure employees need to develop skills, share knowledge and prepare others to take on critical responsibilities.
Get the Full Picture: Read the 2026 State of Maintenance Report
Workforce challenges rarely exist in isolation. Reactive work, maintenance fundamentals, technology investments and other operational factors can all affect your ability to develop employees, transfer knowledge and build a more stable maintenance workforce.
The State of Maintenance Report examines these connections across 55 manufacturing organizations and identifies seven key decisions that influence long-term maintenance performance, including which areas organizations should address first and which improvements should come later.
Use the report to understand why these challenges persist, how your results compare to the broader research and where to focus your improvement efforts next.
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