Trained or Just Familiar? The Hidden Cost of ‘Figure It Out’ Training in Industrial Maintenance

Workforce & Capability

A few years ago, I was sitting in the back of a training room observing a calibration session. The instructor — a veteran technician with 20+ years on the floor — had the group perform a 4–20 mA loop calibration. When I asked one of the attendees afterward to walk me through what he’d do if his HART communicator showed a trim value outside tolerance, he paused. Then he gave me the answer he’d heard the veteran give someone else six months prior. Not wrong. Not right either. Just… borrowed.

That moment is more common than most managers want to admit. It points to a gap that no amount of classroom time can close on its own: the gap between a technician who has seen something done and a technician who can actually do it — consistently, under pressure, and without supervision.

The uncomfortable truth is that much of what passes for maintenance training in U.S. industrial facilities is not training at all. It is familiarity. And familiarity has a cost that only shows up later — in bearing failures that shouldn’t have happened, in misread calibration data, in as-left values recorded without a corresponding as-found baseline. It shows up on the day shift after the senior tech retires.

Why “See One, Do One” Is Not a Training Program

Researchers have studied training transfer — the degree to which trainees actually apply what they’ve learned on the job — for decades. The landmark 1988 study by Timothy Baldwin and Kevin Ford established the framework that still guides most serious training design today. Their finding, and the finding of nearly every follow-on study since, is sobering: without deliberate design, structured reinforcement, and verified application, the majority of what is taught in a training event never makes it back to the job.

A substantial body of research, including Baldwin and Ford’s original work and Blume et al.’s 2010 meta-analysis, consistently finds that somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of skills and knowledge from training are transferred and sustained on the job. That means for every dollar spent on a training event, somewhere between seventy and ninety cents is evaporating somewhere between the classroom and the work order.

In industrial maintenance, the consequences are not abstract. A technician who attended a bearing installation training but never had their torque sequence verified by someone who knew what to look for is not trained. They are familiar. Familiar with the steps, familiar with the tools, familiar with the correct answer on a post-test. Familiar is not the same as competent, and the difference shows up in MTBF data, in unplanned downtime, and occasionally in something far more serious.

There is another layer that practitioners rarely discuss openly: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Dunning and Kruger’s 1999 study at Cornell found that people with limited knowledge in a domain tend to significantly overestimate their own competence — not out of arrogance, but because they lack the expertise to recognize what they don’t know. In maintenance, this is not a character flaw. It is a structural outcome of an environment where competency is assumed rather than measured. A technician who has done a task a hundred times using a flawed method does not feel uncertain. They feel experienced.

Two Models of Developing a Maintenance Workforce

I spent years in the United States Air Force maintaining aircraft. The thing that separated military aircraft maintenance from what I’ve seen in most industrial environments is not the difficulty of the work — commercial maintenance can be every bit as technically demanding. The difference is structure. In the Air Force, you did not move to the next task until you demonstrated the previous one to a qualified evaluator. There were no guesses about whether someone could perform a task. There was documentation. There was verification. There was a signed-off record that stood behind every aircraft that went up.

The check-ride model — where a pilot demonstrates proficiency to a qualified evaluator on a defined schedule, and where a finding is treated as a data point for improvement rather than punishment — exists because the alternative is unacceptable. Nobody wonders whether the pilot who just flew a check-ride can actually perform emergency procedures. They know, because someone verified it. In most industrial facilities, the equivalent of that check-ride simply does not exist.

The Framework We Keep Coming Back To

When we work with maintenance and reliability teams to build training programs that actually hold, we keep returning to the same six-element structure. It is not complicated. But it requires a decision by leadership to treat technician competency as something that is built and verified — not assumed and hoped for.

What Changes When the Framework Takes Hold

The operational changes are not immediate, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. In the first six to twelve months, the primary output is visibility. You learn what your workforce actually knows versus what you assumed they knew. That is uncomfortable. It is also necessary, because you cannot close a gap you have not measured.

Between twelve and eighteen months, the verification culture begins to take root. Technicians who initially treated competency checks as a judgment of their worth come to understand them as professional validation — evidence that their craft is taken seriously. This is a meaningful cultural shift, and it does not happen through posters or all-hands meetings. It happens when a verified technician sees that their documentation follows them, that their competency is recognized, and that there is a progression pathway ahead of them.

By month eighteen to thirty-six, the structural benefits become visible in the data. Equipment reliability improves on assets where verified task performance is now the standard. PM completion quality improves. The senior technician who retires is no longer a crisis. Their knowledge was captured, verified, and transferred.

The Craft Deserves Better Than “Figure It Out”

The industrial maintenance workforce is facing pressure from every direction: an aging workforce taking decades of knowledge into retirement, a new generation of technicians who need that knowledge transferred in years rather than decades, and equipment that keeps getting more complex. “Figure it out” was never a real training strategy. It was a placeholder that worked tolerably well when the same experienced hands were on every piece of equipment for thirty years. That era is over.

What I have found, consistently, is that technicians do not resist structured competency development. They resist the implication that they don’t know what they’re doing. When the program is designed to reveal capability rather than catch failure — when the check-ride is a professional milestone rather than a gotcha — technicians lean into it. They want their craft taken seriously. They want to be able to say, with documentation behind it, that they know what they are doing. The framework gives them that. The work of getting there belongs to the teams who build it and the leadership who commits to it.