Gradual Retirement with Mixed Reality: Retaining Critical Knowledge

I was recently talking with a customer in the aviation sector, who brought up a problem being faced by a lot of our clients these days: older workers are retiring and taking decades of experience and knowledge with them.

The generation that can remember the first moon landing is reaching its golden years, and droves of top-flight employees are retiring. In many cases, their employers are losing operational know-how accrued over decades of work. These people know things that aren’t in textbooks or instruction manuals, and it can take years for younger workers to learn these intangibles, often through trial and error.

Mixed reality, or MR, is the blending of the physical and virtual worlds to enhance interactivity and knowledge transfer. It requires the user to don a headset, but unlike virtual reality that person has full sensory perception of the surrounding environment.

We have a solution: mixed reality.

You may be surprised to think that such a solution could help address the problem of retiring workers removing skills and knowledge from your company. However, experience has shown that MR can help skilled field workers ease into retirement and help them impart their wisdom to a new generation of frontline engineers and technicians. 

Understanding the Challenges Currently in Our Workforces

By asking the experienced worker to move to a part-time position with a mixed reality solution, acting as a remote expert, you create a win-win-win situation for the retiring worker, their younger counterpart, and your company.

Conversations about retiring workers are happening more frequently in the industrial world. Already this year, I’ve discussed the subject with a handful of other customers, including those in food production, automotive, and other verticals. The data show it’s a problem across the economy.

The fact is more people are reaching retirement age than ever before. In the U.S., economists have coined the term “peak 65” which means the wave of Baby Boomers reaching their 65th birthday is cresting. According to the Retirement Income Institute, more than 11,200 Americans will turn 65 every day from 2024 through 2027. That’s 4.1 million people a year in the U.S. alone.  In the U.K., it’s the same story. The retirement technology provider Dunstan Thomas estimates that nearly 1.2 million baby boomers left the British workforce during the pandemic.

Many of these people are retiring, and if you’ve read this far you probably understand what this means for the operational side of industry. These retiring workers are taking years of experience with them, and companies are noticing like never before the yawning knowledge gap between the older and younger workers.

Mixed reality can help you bridge this gap. Not only can it help younger front-line workers get that critical knowledge transfer from their mentors, but it can help your overall organisation in its digital transformation by acting as a conduit for accessing knowledge anywhere and anytime they need it.

As the retired and younger employee work together with MR systems, they contribute to the growing proficiency of your workforce in enabling  digital transformation. The result is increased productivity and an agile workforce that is committed to improving operations through the use of technology.

Role of Mixed Reality - Bridging the Experience Gap

Mixed reality is the perfect solution for having experienced engineers or workers collaborate with their younger peers and bring them up to speed on the tools of the trade. Both parties – the retiree at home and the up-and-comer working in the field – switch on to RemoteSpark, be it through the end-user’s mixed reality device or the expert’s PC, and are able to collaborate in real time. They can talk to one another, ask and answer questions, share content, and work on the same problem. There are no more emails, voice messages, or taking pictures with a phone and then sending them to someone after the fact – it’s all in real time. What’s more, the younger engineer is hands free, so he or she can work on tasks while communicating with the seasoned veteran.

For the younger person, there is re-assurance that they are gradually learning the ins and outs of your company’s systems. Over time, they will absorb all the pertinent knowledge of the retired worker, and gain more as new systems comes on stream. This is continuous mentorship, so over time, this younger employee will gain not just knowledge, but also confidence and job satisfaction.

Gradual Retirement in Practice

The experience of our aforementioned customer in the aviation industry can demonstrate how MR can address this problem. The company provides airfield operations and other services for two fleets in the U.K. It works with radar systems and other such technology, and some of these systems are old and have their own quirks.

The engineer who oversaw these systems recently retired, and the company realised there was a huge gap between his knowledge base and that of the person who was replacing him. Management solved this problem by suggesting this engineer choose gradual retirement, at least in the short-term. They equipped him with a laptop and RemoteSpark to allow him to carry out his duties from home twice a week.

Without leaving his home, the retired engineer can log on for two days a week and work with the less experienced colleague who replaced him. This approach offers the retiree two-fold value. First, it brings in a bit of additional income for the first years of retirement, and second, it softens the adjustment from full-time employment to retirement. Meanwhile for the organisation, the younger worker benefits in knowing that all his questions about operations can be answered by a more experienced engineer.

By providing the real-time, remote guidance and immersive training experience, MR can bridge that experience gap. This connection figuratively and literally between the techs ensures that valuable expertise remains within the company and contributes to the continuous development of the organisation’s internal workforce.

Bridging the Knowledge Gap

The knowledge gap in the industrial world today is vast and creating huge pain for ambitious companies. But there is a solution. Many of the companies that overcome this problem will use mixed reality to allow seasoned veterans to pass on their hard-won knowledge to a new generation of employees.

They understand that it helps the retiring workers ease into retirement and maintain some income.

It helps the rising stars within your organization gain knowledge and confidence.

But most of all it helps your company bring your most important employees up to their potential as quickly as possible and advance your digital transformation. Your competitors are probably considering this option. Adopt it before they do.