Skill shortage - I am seeing this happening in the factory I work in. We were employee owned, and made a wide variety of designer products. There were folks here that specialized in making these products and had been doing so for 15-20 years. A few years back we got bought out by a company who didn’t offer some of the products we made to their customers. Our production on these specialized products stopped and the folks who made them left or retired as they didn’t want to do anything else. We hundreds of combined experience with that. Now unfortunately if our company decides to start producing these products again, all that “brain is drained” and I don’t know if we can ever find that brain again.

Even when not talking about the specialized products, and only talking in terms of the most standard product the “brain is drained”. The average years of experience for team members making standard product is less then 5 or 6 years where just a few years ago the average years of experience was easily over 10 years.

Thanks for sharing your experience @willsellon — it certainly does show how much of an impact skill shortages and turnover can have. Losing that specialised knowledge is tough, especially when a company undergoes changes like mergers or shifting product lines. It makes me wonder—how do you think businesses can better prepare to preserve critical expertise during these changes? Is it more about rebuilding experience within the current team, or adjusting expectations when that "brain drain" happens? 

Inviting anyone to jump in and share their perspective too! 

Like the fact you are feeding back. 

My concern is that the main concern to date has not solution yet available where any company with employees / contractors etc can be fully inclusive by having all either in or registered to the system.

Issues is great as it allows feedback from anyone, however in reality we have had to control this slightly as some people saw this as an option to slow the company down by simply adding issues of no relevance. 

I like anonymous but I want prescribed inclusion. 

I want every person that comes on to any of our sites and projects to be within safety culture in order that we can deal with reality in front line workers. 

Thank you. 

Much like @willsellon our company has lost a lot of the longer term employees, many of the current employees have been with the company two years or less.

To answer @Bianca.Taylor’s question we are planning to put a lot of focus on on the floor training. We’re finding that we have a huge need to standardize practices. 

We’ve met with another non-competitive company that has gone through the process of developing this type of training to get some tips to get started. They do training right on the floor with a leader and employee 1:1 and then they also perform the task they just learned about together. They use Alchemy playbook and coach - I think with some development time we can use Safety Culture the same way.

I would love to have the opportunity to with with someone at Safety Culture on this project. I’m hoping to start mapping things out soon.

The contractor/employee side of what was raised imo can be a solution. 

You build SWPs, Elearning or JSAs or similar.

Then you do the learning for all personnel and add in the practical. 

We already do these and follow a process related to the specific learning or course etc. 

My query was not around this but more about a current missing 95% of personnel whom we use as part of our supply chain and undertake the work but they are self employed.

At the moment it is just not feasible to pay for all contractors / self employed to be on this system.

We want and need to get to these people in our system in order to address, understand and change the culture from within. 

Regards Johnny