You wouldn't board an airplane whose pilot never touched a flight simulator. Yet, that is effectively the standard of practice across much of the industrial manufacturing sector today. Put an airline cockpit and a processing plant control room side by side, and the parallels are striking: both environments demand split-second judgment from people who carry enormous responsibility for human safety, capital assets, environmental stewardship and brand reputation. Where the two professions diverge is in how seriously that responsibility is codified into training.

Whereas the aviation industry has institutionalized recurring training and mandatory proficiency checks to prepare crews for abnormal situation handling before they arise in service, manufacturers are left with the burden of interpreting OSHA expectations that lack clear certification guidelines and enforcement. For example, FAA-mandated minimums of at least 20 training hours are required to maintain certification for commercial pilots, and those benchmarks were raised again in 2025 in response to escalating safety concerns.  

In contrast, the industrial control room story is one of declining averages. Operators only log an average of 20 training hours annually against a recommended minimum of 60-hours by multiple industrial bodies, and that annual number of actual training hours completed continues to trend downward.  Further, it is estimated that less than 50% of plant operators today are formally trained on a digital twin or operator training system (OTS), analogous to the pilot flight simulator where abnormal situation training should occur.

Though regulatory compliance and operational proficiency are undoubtedly related goals, their distinction rests in the shoes of that junior technician responding to a plant emergency at 2:00 am on a Saturday morning. Meeting applicable training requirements should be foundational to all organizational charters, but building resilient troubleshooting competencies as a foundational skill set for plant personnel is what enables employees to apply the right knowledge to the right situation.

The problem

While most organizations in our industry by now have experienced the “industrial workforce crisis” first-hand, few seem to be actually solving it. It's a problem that engineers, operators, and technicians alike live every day, and one that a decade of data has now confirmed. The accelerating pace of technological advancements; employee turnover is prevalent; and limited opportunity for practice strains employees who are already understaffed and under-trained.  Let’s examine five compounding gaps that manufacturers must close to address this problem.

Consumption gap: This facet of the problem is perfectly embodied by Gordon Moore’s premonition that inversely proportioned technology innovation and offsetting cost reductions would continue to propel change beyond a worker’s ability to absorb it.  Automation, robotics and AI have accelerated a trend first observed in the 1980s to the point of crisis: facilities still run analog (and some pneumatic!) controls even when more than 95% of their field devices are digitally native, because usability has been prioritized over optimization. Consider the opportunity cost of manufacturers opting not to capitalize on the rich diagnostic capabilities inherent within modern HART-enabled instrumentation.  They’ve already paid for this technology but are stopping short of reaping its benefits by not training technicians on how to properly implement those features throughout installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting.  That compromise alone costs most plants millions in forfeited revenue potential each year.

Design gap: While this abstract is not meant to serve as a critique of EPC firms, it is undeniable that the greenfield construction of new facilities exposes this next gap in its purest form. The same can be interpolated at smaller scale for manufacturers expanding and retooling existing production lines. Extensive studies by Solomon and MRG corroborate that projects are delivered at only a third-quartile performance benchmark when undergoing TIC (total installed cost) optimization management practices, largely because compressed timelines and budgets squeeze out maintenance and reliability considerations during design.  It's unreasonable to expect workers to hit top-quartile performance on assets that were never engineered to support it – especially when that EPC mentality relegates essential training as an unnecessary expense, rather than a lifecycle performance investment. Plants that operate at the lower end of that range incur double-digit maintenance costs against replacement asset valuations, effectively burning enough working capital to rebuild themselves every seven years.  Applying these lessons-learned at even the smaller scale helps manufacturers to avoid the trap of paying multiple-times for decisions to neglect Maintenance, Reliability, and Training considerations at the design phase.

Performance gap: Manufacturing sees more than double the industry-wide average rate of operator error, translating into roughly $320 billion in forfeited GDP annually and a 60% share of attributable safety incidents. Nearly a quarter of all manufacturing losses, such as unplanned shutdowns, scrap, or slowdowns, trace back to inadequate training. Once worker turnover is added, a typical 500-person facility loses an estimated $7.5 million a year in revenue and productivity to labor churn alone.  The fact remains that gaps in troubleshooting and system-wide, procedural understanding are most often the culprit behind such repeat failures.  When plants run understaffed and under-trained, precious time that could otherwise be proactively allocated towards root-cause identification is hence squandered on chasing the wrong problems and ineffective troubleshooting, forming a vicious death-spiral of productivity out of which most manufactures rarely emerge.  Avoidable downtime and inconsistent maintenance behaviors tally significant losses at the equipment, production, and personnel levels. 

Skills gap: A 2024 Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute study projected that U.S. producers could require as many as 3.8 million additional employees between 2024 and 2033, with 1.9 million positions potentially unfilled if the present workforce challenges persist. In the National Association of Manufacturers’ first-quarter 2024 outlook survey, 65% of respondents identified attracting and retaining talent as their primary business challenge.  With a quarter of the industrial workforce over the age of 55 and only 8% under the age of 25, the objective magnitude of this problem serves as a precursor to how our current trajectory of employment rates may lead to only half of those critical roles being filled.  And while other parts of the globe are not immune to this same worker-age-disparity, consider that most Eastern European countries have more than 12x the level of apprenticeship program participation over those in North America, where less than 0.3% of working age Americans are actively enrolled.

Training gap: Effective problem resolution in modern manufacturing plants relies upon a homogenized blend of academic learning, hands-on time spent in real-world scenarios, and intuition that can only be forged from learning by mistakes.  Classroom learning alone cannot fill that gap.  According to a 2023 “State of Manufacturing Employee Training Report,” only 35% of producers believe that their training works, and only 15% of students reported being able to apply classroom learning on the job. Those statistics are nothing new and are underpinned by decades of behavioral psychology and heuristic observations.  The Adult Learning Theory research consistently shows that 70% of traditional classroom instruction is forgotten within 24 hours.  In fact, 90% of new knowledge can fade within a week, absent any hands-on reinforcement by which students can revisit and use those skills.  

Better training

These aren't abstract statistics for Experitec, either. The company found itself living the same problems from the inside as more and more young engineers were entering its workforce straight from 2- and 4-year graduate programs, often lacking the necessary pretext of having applied academic instruction in the real-world.  During COVID-era social distancing, hands-on training became increasingly difficult to sustain, as was time spent afield with manufacturers. Rapid project growth further strained the company’s ability to screen and onboard technical talent efficiently. There was real urgency to compress the learning curve for young engineers and technicians, both for their own development and for the business' sake.

The same pain was showing up on the client side. Capital projects rarely produced a net-positive labor pool in the surrounding region. Companies moved trained staff from one facility to another, and heavy turnover complicated matters further. Manufacturers needed a better way to justify training investments aimed at developing employees while also retaining and attracting talent.

Few manufacturers can justify building a dedicated training lab or pilot plant, and the ones who try often struggle to keep it current as leadership turnover and equipment lifecycle costs pile up. Sending workers to off-site classes is expensive and pulls already-lean teams off the floor. Virtual modules alone rarely translate into the muscle memory required for real operational competence and lack the technical knowledge application mandated by the Adult Learning Theory.

As an example, a paper mill with whom Experitec worked spent more than a decade attempting to build its own training environment, aspiring to solve its own workforce crisis. Much of the equipment purchased along the way was obsolete before it was ever used, and the program became fundamentally bottlenecked by its own capacity to manage and administer instructional lesson plans.  Plus, the maintenance component of amassing physical training assets became an overwhelming component of the training environment which the mill did not properly anticipate at its inception.

Change needed

The distinction between organizations that get training right and those that quietly write off the budget every year comes down to a handful of principles. It's an "and," not an "or" proposition. Classroom instruction should be paired with hands-on reinforcement, not one in place of the other.

Students need room to fail safely. By adhering to the “3Ds” of training (DescribeàDemonstrateàDo), muscle memory can be forged in filling the various aforementioned gaps.  It’s the same reason pilots log more simulator hours than flight hours, because critical judgment is built through trial and error, not lecture.  It is also the same rationale presupposing why Engineers, Operators, and Technicians should learn on high-consequence scenarios in offline spaces without real-world consequences.

Scenario-based training consistently outperforms sequential, step-by-step instruction, as it layers the propensity for deductive reasoning atop hands-on training that separates a real troubleshooter from someone chasing symptoms.

Applying lessons

The evidence is clear that a useful training environment is one that is easily used, easily accessible, and remains current/supported on the technologies required by its staff.  Training on complete systems, not isolated components, matters enormously for E&I, Maintenance, and Reliability professionals who need to trace causation across interacting loops, devices, and equipment. Repetition—structured, not redundant—needs to be woven continuously between classroom time and time in the field.

These principles became the design brief for the Performance Learning Platform (PLP): a "factory on wheels" concept built to bring realistic, systems-level training directly to the workforce. The approach was first used in Experitec’s internal onboarding process for those young engineers, before being extended into a broader market for manufacturers and educators chasing the same outcomes. What was working for one side of the coin rapidly gained traction on the other.

The PLP is a functioning miniature process environment. Pumps move fluid through real equipment. Pressure, temperature, level and flow instruments measure the process, and control valves manipulate it. A modern control system connects the equipment and closes the loops. Learners use the asset-management, calibration and diagnostic tools they would encounter in a plant to understand how the system behaves. This combination accelerates learning as much as also builds tool familiarity.

As one example exercise, an instructor might introduce air into a Coriolis meter and ask learners to investigate an unstable measurement. They compare process conditions with meter diagnostics to identify the cause. Another exercise may require a technician to trace a calibration or configuration discrepancy from the field instrument through the control-system indication, or use valve travel checks, step tests and diagnostic information to connect a command signal with the actual response. Each scenario begins with a symptom and asks the learner to create a hypothesis and subsequent test procedural as explanation.

Training can be built around the device technologies, measurement and control principles, common failure modes and maintenance workflows employees encounter at their own facilities. The depth and scenarios vary for operators, E&I/maintenance technicians and engineers. The goal is to reproduce the relevant workflows, relationships and decisions employees need to understand when they return to work.

Results

Where sentiments seem to soar regarding this type of training approach is with the ability to demonstrate non-textbook scenarios (common in real-world, but not glamourous in a classroom), especially in preparation for abnormal manufacturing events such as startups and turnarounds.  Go ask any Outage Manager or Production Superintendent how many days are added to the end of their loop checkouts due to field devices being left out-of-service. Or ask a Maintenance Manager about their version of the tale involving an unnecessary control valve replacement because what was deemed a failed positioner was just a manually closed supply line to the actuator that nobody bothered to check.  Successfully immersing students in these types of safe training scenarios that encourage learning from mistakes is why a tool such as the Performance Learning Platform (PLP) is swiftly becoming an indispensable arrow in the modern industrial training quiver.

As for Experitec, early internal adoption of this model quickly ballooned into a full-blown best-practice for any new hires, ranging from controls engineers, valve technicians, reliability specialists, etc. The same principle that has allowed Experitec to cut new-hire training time nearly in half is what is now helping manufacturers to design training programs around the troubleshooting DNA desired on the plant floor.

Manufacturers who have partnered with Experitec on the Performance Learning Platform report similar gains in proficiency and retention, showing that the industry's training problem is far from unsolvable. The goal is to help employees connect what they know with what they can diagnose and do, by applying meaningful scenarios on realistic tools and assets to garner decision-making confidence. However you aspire to solve your version of the workforce crisis, remember that training that omits any of the 3Ds is likely to underperform and disappoint.