Utilizing the accomplished veteran’s knowledge through mentorship

Recently a statistic was published by the NNSA on www.energy.gov that stated “40% of the workforce for NNSA (National Nuclear Security Agency) will be eligible for retirement within the next 5 years”. Those individuals have a wealth of knowledge that will become lost. Therefore, mentoring should be an important practice in every organization. The goal of mentorship, particularly in the engineering profession, is to grow, advance, and most importantly pass along the knowledge that comes from many years of experience. This is where the veteran becomes invaluable.

To stay on top of the game, engineers and designers should take advantage of working closely with those who are willing to mentor and pass on years of valuable experience. Mentoring does not have to be a formal program that takes a lot of effort, but simply informal communications, conversations, and collaboration with those more experienced. Those “lessons learned” conversations add tremendous value to engineering and design projects, thereby cultivating smarter designs which consider operation, maintenance, reliability, and fabrication. It also helps keep that experience and knowledge from becoming lost.