The Wisdom You Can't Write Down | John Molloy

"It's a lot of tribal knowledge that you can never seem to capture at all."

That's John Molloy, Training Manager for Fluid and Motion Control at Emerson, on the hardest part of his job: getting 40 years of institutional knowledge out of the people who have it and into the people who just started.

John has spent 28 years at Emerson, most of it split between selling valves and training the people who came in after him. He also sits on the VMA education committee.

In this episode of the Fully Open Podcast, host Gil Welsford Jr. sits down with John at VMA headquarters to talk about what actually works when a company tries to close the gap between its most experienced people and its newest hires, before that experience walks out the door.

💡 What you'll hear:

- Why John believes sales is really just teaching, not convincing
- The informal buddy system Emerson uses to pair new hires with veterans
- The 90-day rule for what a new hire should realistically know, and the mistake of trying to teach everything at once
- The one thing John tells every new hire on day one
- What John sees engineers get wrong that no spec sheet can teach them
- How John uses AI to build training materials today, and why human oversight still matters

🎯 This isn't just a conversation about training programs. It's a look at what it actually takes to keep decades of hard-won knowledge alive once the person who has it retires.

👤 Connect with John Molloy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpmolloy/
🔗 Learn more about Emerson: https://www.emerson.com
🔧 Explore Valve & Actuation Solutions from ValveMan: https://valveman.com/

If something stood out or sparked a thought, I would love to hear it.