Knowledge Preservation
Your Best Operator Is Retiring. What Happens to What They Know?
Preserve the practical know-how your most experienced people carry. YBA Knowledge turns that expertise into a company-owned video training library.
Summary
What this article covers
When experienced operators retire, practical knowledge can leave with them. YBA Knowledge captures that know-how in a customized video training library, built around your workflows and vocabulary, that your company owns and YBA produces and manages.
Key Takeaways
Direct answers
- Practical knowledge often lives with experienced employees, making retirement a reason to capture and share it while those people are still available.
- YBA turns footage your team captures and content we produce into reviewed lessons, with narration, written guides, transcripts, and quizzes.
- Your company owns a training library organized around its workflows and vocabulary, while YBA builds, hosts, manages, and updates it.
Every plant has a few people the operation depends on. One knows the setting that isn't in the manual. Another can hear a machine starting to fail. Someone else knows the order of steps that keeps a batch from being scrapped. Most of it was never written down.
Many of those people are close to retirement. U.S. manufacturing could need as many as 3.8 million new workers between 2024 and 2033, according to Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute's 2024 study. Up to 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if workforce challenges are not addressed. Every new hire has to learn the work from someone. The people who could teach them are leaving. Companies know this. Many are working to find a solution.
U.S. manufacturing · 2024–2033
Manufacturing’s workforce gap
- New workers needed
- Up to 3.8M
- Jobs that could go unfilled
- Up to 1.9M
Jobs could go unfilled if workforce challenges are not addressed.
In Panopto's 2018 survey of 1,001 U.S. workers, respondents estimated that 42% of their job knowledge was unique to them. That is know-how their coworkers do not share.
Capture the work while your people are still here
We capture that know-how without keeping anyone off the floor. Your people do their jobs. We do ours.
YBA Knowledge lets you create your own customized video training library for your workforce, without learning new software or editing a single frame.
We build the library using raw footage your team captures and content we produce. When your people film the work, a phone or a head-mounted camera is enough. They upload the footage, and YBA turns it into a finished lesson. Where there's no footage, or when the camera can't capture what you want to show, like the inside of a machine or a chemical reaction, we produce it. Your designated team members review and approve each lesson before it is filed in the library.
From YBA's Knowledge Preservation demonstration: the details of the work, explained by someone who knows it. Watch the demonstration.
A library built around your operation
Today, most companies keep their content spread across SharePoint, Dropbox and local drives. Files are saved by different people, in different places, each named its own way. Many are never named at all. A new hire opens a folder and has no idea what's inside, or where to look.
Your YBA Knowledge Library is built to be familiar: a central repository designed to mirror the way your company is organized, categorized to match your workflow and programmed to recognize your native process and vocabulary. The filing system is intuitive, even for new hires.
Every lesson is narrated in the languages your teams speak, formatted for the screens your people use, broken into chapters, with a printable, branded step-by-step guide and transcript. Quizzes come as interactive videos or written questions.
The library is hosted on a private, secure portal that you own, open only to those you grant access. YBA builds it, produces the content you need and keeps it current as your processes and people change. If you ever move on, the library stays with you.
YBA is built to remove the friction of content production, with as little disruption to your work as possible. Our production model runs at a scale and cadence traditional production can't sustain. So we can capture what your most experienced people know across the whole operation, while they are still here.
People retire. What they know can stay.
See what a library built for your company looks like. Request a demo.
FAQ
Common questions
What knowledge should a manufacturer preserve before an operator retires?
Start with the settings, troubleshooting techniques, equipment checks, and sequences that experienced people know but that are missing from the manual. Capture demonstrations while those experts can explain and review the work.
Do we need to learn video editing or buy professional cameras?
No. Your team can capture the work with a phone or head-mounted camera. YBA turns that footage into finished lessons and can produce content where footage is missing or the camera cannot show what needs explaining.
Who reviews the lessons and owns the training library?
Your designated team members review and approve each lesson. Your company owns the library, while YBA builds, hosts, produces, manages, and updates it as your processes change.