As infrastructure demands increase and veteran workers retire, utilities must capture field expertise and turn safety into a system for stronger execution
Utilities are investing billions of dollars in grid modernization while facing the loss of decades of operational expertise. Across the industry, retirements, workforce shortages and increasing grid complexity are creating new execution risks.
Much of the knowledge required to operate, maintain and build critical infrastructure resides in the minds of experienced workers rather than within organizational systems. The challenge facing utilities is not replacing people but to preserve execution quality as expertise leaves the workforce.
Many utilities view safety as a compliance requirement or performance metric. However, safety represents something much more important: it is where operational expertise becomes visible, measurable and transferable. Every job briefing, field observation, tailboard discussion, hazard assessment and near-miss review contains valuable knowledge gained through experience. These daily interactions capture how experienced workers recognize risk, adapt to changing conditions and make decisions in the field.
As veteran employees retire, the industry faces a growing challenge in transferring this expertise consistently to the next generation of workers. The consequences extend beyond safety performance. Safety incidents, execution variability, project delays and reliability challenges often share the same root cause: critical knowledge exists in individual people and cannot be accessed by the rest of the team. When expertise remains isolated within individuals, organizations struggle to scale best practices, onboard new employees efficiently, and maintain consistent performance across crews and contractors.
This reality is driving a shift in how leading utilities think about safety. Rather than treating safety as a separate initiative, they are using it as the foundation for capturing and reinforcing operational expertise. Every safety interaction becomes an opportunity to document what experienced workers know, share that knowledge across the organization, and strengthen execution quality over time. Capturing and reinforcing expertise through everyday work creates a framework for continuous improvement that benefits both safety outcomes and operational performance.
When these activities are documented through digital workflows, that knowledge can be preserved, analyzed and made accessible across the organization. Over time, utilities build a repository of field-tested practices, lessons learned and risk insights that can be applied to future work. This allows crews, supervisors and contractors to benefit from collective experience rather than relying solely on individual knowledge, improving consistency, decision making and operational execution across the workforce.
Industry leaders are already discovering that investments in safety knowledge generate value far beyond traditional safety metrics. National Grid has seen benefits that extend into multiple areas of operational performance. Clara Giustino, Vice President for NY Gas Complex Construction at National Grid, noted that while teams recognized the value of improved hazard identification, they also identified “operational value around time savings, performance management, project and contract performance.” This observation highlights an important reality: the same systems that help workers identify and mitigate hazards also help organizations execute work more consistently and effectively.
Turning safety knowledge into operational performance
The common denominator behind these improvements is the ability to capture, reinforce and apply expertise across the workforce. When knowledge is systematically collected through everyday safety activities, organizations gain visibility into how work is performed, where risks emerge and which practices deliver the best outcomes.
For example, when a supervisor completes a digital job briefing, the hazards identified, controls discussed and field conditions documented do not disappear at the end of the shift. That information becomes part of a growing organizational knowledge base that can be searched, analyzed and shared across crews.
Over time, this institutional knowledge helps utilities improve consistency, identify best practices and reduce reliance on individual experience. It also lays the groundwork for future AI capabilities. As AI becomes more prevalent across utility operations, access to rich repositories of operational knowledge will be essential for training and informing these systems. The expertise captured through everyday safety activities provides the context AI needs to deliver meaningful insights, support decision-making and help organizations scale knowledge across the workforce.
Technology is the mechanism that makes this possible. Digital platforms help utilities adopt best practices, scale expertise across the workforce and drive greater consistency in execution. By embedding knowledge into everyday workflows, organizations can improve performance, reduce reliance on individual experience and accelerate continuous improvement.
For example, a lesson learned during a complex field operation often remains with the crew that experienced it. When captured digitally, however, that insight becomes part of the organization's knowledge base. Future crews can benefit from the experience, supervisors can reinforce the associated best practices, and training programs can incorporate the lesson into onboarding and development activities. In this way, knowledge gained from a single event can improve performance across the entire workforce.
The path to operational excellence begins with safety. It provides the foundation for capturing, preserving and transferring operational expertise throughout the organization. Technology enables that expertise to become organizational knowledge that can be applied consistently across crews, contractors and future generations of workers.
As the utility industry navigates workforce transitions and increasing system complexity, the organizations that outperform over the next decade will be those that capture and operationalize field knowledge before it disappears.
The window to act is narrowing, not because the technology is difficult to deploy, but because the experts who make that knowledge valuable are retiring. Utility leaders face a critical choice: preserve decades of hard-earned expertise today or risk losing it tomorrow. The competitive advantage of the future will belong to organizations that act now to transform safety knowledge into lasting organizational capability.
Learn more about how digital safety workflows can preserve expertise and improve execution: na.itron.com/what-we-offer/worker-safety