2025_EML Capstone Projects

6

Mentor Link Solutions: A Hybrid Mentorship and Knowledge Retention Model Capstone Project Report

Introduction and Problem Motivation

Engineering organizations are facing a critical challenge in preserving and sharing knowledge as

experienced personnel retire or transition to new roles. The tacit knowledge, or knowledge gained

through experience rather than written documentation, is at risk of being lost if programs are not

implemented to capture and transfer the knowledge (Swap et al., 2001).

While the engineering industry is expected to experience modest growth in the near term, a

significant portion of the industry's workforce is nearing retirement age (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,

2019). That trend creates an urgent need for engineering firms to implement scalable strategies to

preserve critical proprietary knowledge and accelerate onboarding and development of new employees.

Without immediate action, a mass industry exodus may create a skills gap that increases costs, delays

onboarding, and leads to operational inefficiencies (Welker, 2023).

Most firms utilize informal mentorship programs that lack the consistency, structure, and

success metrics that are necessary to ensure adequate training and development (Guerra, 2023).

Additionally, documentation initiatives are treated as secondary priorities and are poorly integrated into

existing workflows, which leads to organizational abandonment before ROI is ever achieved. This

capstone project addresses the need to create a system that balances knowledge transfer and process

documentation by proposing a hybrid solution that integrates structured mentorship with a scalable

documentation and knowledge retention system. The system deployment is designed as a consulting

ready solution that any engineering firm can implement within their organization to enhance

professional development, increase agility, and maintain high performance even during workforce

transitions.