2025_EML Capstone Projects

10

Mentor Link Solutions: A Hybrid Mentorship and Knowledge Retention Model

Management Toolkit providing practical tools and best practices, and the ASME Mentorship Report

demonstrating how mentorship builds talent pipelines were especially relevant.

Methodology

Our methodology included both qualitative and quantitative elements. With our primary source

of data coming from literature review, we elected to complete a survey of our engineering peers and

managers to evaluate mentorship and its impact on onboarding time, onboarding satisfaction, and

documentation accessibility. Our quantitative metrics included onboarding times, mentorship

participation, retention rates before/after intervention, and documentation satisfaction scores. Our

qualitative inputs came from open-ended responses describing onboarding experiences and perceived

barriers to knowledge sharing, as well as observed barriers to knowledge sharing.

Key Insights

Several patterns emerged from our data review and analysis. Mentorship programs tend to succeed

when paired with organizational support and a defined structure (Guerra, 2023). This supported our

decision to embed mentorship into the team dynamic with assigned roles. Documentation tools are

underutilized in daily workflows (SolveXia, 2023). This influenced our decision to utilize shared tools,

such as Microsoft Teams and OneDrive, to enhance access to knowledge and documentation and

increase productivity. Tacit knowledge loss is significant and has become a measurable threat to

workforce continuity (Swap et al, 2001). This data helped steer our project toward a hybrid approach. A

hybrid model enhances onboarding and long-term continuity by balancing knowledge storage with the

human connection that fosters tacit learning. The engineering stakeholder survey highlighted a

significant correlation between mentorship and onboarding efficiency. As seen in Table 2, those who

received mentorship, regardless of their experience level, were onboarded more quickly, had higher

onboarding satisfaction, and were more comfortable finding documentation.