There’s an old joke about the retired engineer who is hired as a consultant to his former employer to fix a particularly daunting problem with a piece of equipment that no one else can seem to figure out. Ultimately, the engineer solves the problem using a single screw. Upon reviewing the invoice for his work, the manager is astounded by the price. “A hundred-thousand dollars!?!  he exclaims. “All you did was install a screw! How can you charge a $100,000 for that?”

“Simple”, the engineer explains. “$1 dollar for the screw, and $99,999 for knowing where to install it.”

While intentionally exaggerated (much to the satisfaction of engineers everywhere), there’s an oh-so-true reality here. The $1 screw was not singularly responsible for fixing the problem. In fact, that $1 part is completely useless without the additional benefit of the engineer’s knowledge. Therein lies the real value.

However, this type of knowledge that is acquired over a long time and through the benefit of great experience is notoriously difficult to capture. Which is precisely why that in the story above, the engineer was able to command a ransom for what he knew. It clearly did not exist anywhere else inside the organization.

This is exactly the situation that many companies find themselves in today. Part of the workforce owns a great deal of the information required to keep the ship afloat and pointed in the right direction, but what happens when the individuals who make up that part of the workforce retire or move on to other jobs?

Some types of knowledge can be passed on to the organization-at-large through the use of off the shelf training. There are services that client companies can subscribe to that will give their employees access to training resources on all sorts of relevant topics. Software training, personal and soft skills training, sales training, safety training, even generalized machine tool operational training. You name it, there’s likely training available and accessible via the web. You can sign up and assign your entire staff to attend and complete the training courses of your choosing. Sign up, sit down, get trained and Bob’s-your-uncle. Done and done. Trained.

Right?

Well, sure. Sometimes. If you needed your accounts receivable staffers to brush up on Excel 2007, probably. If you needed your plant personnel to better understand current OSHA regulations, sure. Off the shelf training programs certainly do have some clear value, no question.

However, if you have the challenge of conveying the type of knowledge that only comes from years of experience and interaction with your operating conditions or processes, it may be hard to bridge that gap with off the shelf training. That type of knowledge, the “oh-no-the-line’s-gone-down-and -Jim’s-on-vacation” mission-critical and specific type of knowlege, has to come from within.

And while that can seem to be a daunting task, to capture that knowledge and then create and deliver training information to the larger organization, the long term benefits in terms of prevention alone will be enormous.

So next time line #6 goes down, it won’t matter that Jim went on on vacation, Steve knows that sometimes all it takes is to check the connection on the back of the optical sensor to get things up and running again.

But how exactly can your company do this? I’ll outline some basic project steps in the next entry.