Keeping project knowledge findable when senior engineers retire

By Yermek Ibray, Founder & CEO of SalemWise. Published October 14, 2026. The workforce numbers come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the ACEC Research Institute; the Vantagepoint facts come from Deltek's own pages. All were checked October 14, 2026, and each links to its source.

This guide is mostly process, and most of it costs nothing but time. Where software helps, we name the options, including ours. If you want to talk through your own archive, Book a free 30-minute call.

How many engineers are close to retirement?

About one civil engineer in five. In the Current Population Survey's 2025 annual averages, the U.S. had 525,000 employed civil engineers: 67,000 were 55 to 64 years old and 43,000 were 65 or older (BLS, CPS table 11b, accessed October 14, 2026). Across all architecture and engineering occupations it was 826,000 of 3,675,000, or about 22%. BLS notes that its 2025 figures are 11-month averages, because October 2025 data were not collected during the federal shutdown.

The ACEC Research Institute's October 2025 report, The Workforce of the Future, estimates that "in 2022, an estimated 184,000 engineers retired or left the profession, including 85,000 in civil, mechanical, and electrical fields," while new graduates available to work (about 166,000) fell short, "leaving a net shortage of ~18,000 engineers overall and ~8,400 in civil, mechanical, or electrical" (ACEC Research Institute, accessed October 14, 2026). The same report is careful about its own estimate: employment of engineers rose by nearly 44,500 in 2023, and ACEC says engineers may not be retiring "at the same rate as the overall labor force."

BLS projects about 22,700 openings for civil engineers each year through 2035, and says many of them come from the need to replace workers who move to other jobs "or exit the labor force, such as to retire" (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, accessed October 14, 2026).

The national numbers matter less than your own. Count the people at your firm who are 60 or older, and list the clients and project types only they have worked on. That list is your real exposure.

What knowledge actually leaves with a senior engineer?

Three kinds, and only one of them is in the files.

• Where things are. Which folder, which drive, which old job number held the pump station study. This is findable if the files are searchable. Today it often lives in one person's memory.
• Why things were done. Why the design used that infiltration rate, why the client rejected the first alignment, why the 1998 retrofit kept the old wet well. Part of this is written down in reports, calc packages and memos. The rest was never written down.
• Who to call. The client's operations manager, the reviewer at the permitting agency who reads every footnote. This is relationships. No archive holds it.

Software can help with the first kind, and with the written part of the second. The unwritten reasons and the relationships need people, and they need time before the retirement date.

Can Vantagepoint hold institutional knowledge?

It holds the project record well, and that is a real part of the answer. Vantagepoint keeps projects, employees, clients and contracts. Each project record has a Proposals tab "to enter a project's background or history information, including project codes, descriptions, awards received, and associated proposals" (Deltek help, checked October 14, 2026). Since release 2026.1, Deltek says Ask Dela "now searches user-defined hubs, fields, and grids and returns aggregated results across projects, contacts, firms, and employees" (Deltek, March 17, 2026, checked October 14, 2026). So "who worked on our last three reservoir projects?" is a fair question for it.

Ask Dela can also read documents someone uploads to a project's contracts: "Supported file types include text-based PDF, Word, RTF, and TXT" (Vantagepoint 2026.1 release notes, checked October 14, 2026). Since 2026.3, users can also attach existing project files to a project's Contracts grid (Vantagepoint 2026.3 release notes, checked October 14, 2026). We found nothing in Deltek's release notes or help saying Ask Dela searches the rest of the archive: the final reports, calc packages and scanned plan sets on network drives, SharePoint and ProjectWise that hold the "why". Ask your rep to show it on those files. If you are evaluating Vantagepoint for knowledge retention, judge it on the record and plan something else for the files.

Other ERPs and PSA tools are in the same position: they keep who, when and how much. That is necessary, and it is not the same thing as keeping what the engineer knew.

What should you do in the 12 months before a senior engineer retires?

A checklist we would use ourselves. Start it a year out if you can; six months still works.

• List their projects from the last 10 years, from Vantagepoint or your project list, and mark the ones likely to come back: repeat clients, assets due for rehab, open warranty items.
• For each marked project, write down where the files live (drive, folder, ProjectWise vault) in the project record, not in an email.
• Book a 30-minute recorded walkthrough per marked project: the engineer opens the final report and calc package and says what matters and why. File the notes in the project folder.
• Ask the "why" questions on the five projects most likely to return: design assumptions, what was rejected and why, what they would do differently now.
• Pair them with a successor on one live pursuit. ACEC's report recommends firms "pair senior leaders with rising talent on high-stakes pursuits."
• Update their résumé and project descriptions while they can still check them. A description written after they leave will be thinner.
• Name a records owner for each repeat client, so questions have somewhere to go after the retirement date.
• Make their key scanned reports and plan sets text-searchable (OCR), starting with the marked projects.
• Run the five-question test below, once before they leave and again three months after.

Which approaches keep project knowledge findable, and what does each miss?

Want to see the last row on a fictional sample archive? Try the live demo, or Book a free 30-minute call about your own.

Our guides on Microsoft 365 Copilot and Glean alternatives cover the company-wide search row in more detail.

How do you test whether project knowledge is still findable?

Use five real questions, not a vendor's demo set.

1. Ask the retiring engineer for five questions only they can answer quickly today. Good ones name a project and a number: "what design storm did we use for the 2009 detention pond expansion, and why?"
2. Write down their answers and where each answer is written, if anywhere.
3. Give the questions to a junior engineer with whatever you have: folders, Vantagepoint, SharePoint search, or a tool on trial.
4. Time each search and note whether the junior found the document and page, not just a plausible answer.
5. Any question with no written answer goes back to step three of the checklist: record it now.

Repeat the test three months after the retirement date. If the junior can still answer four of five with a source they can open, the knowledge stayed findable.

Where does Corpus fit, and where doesn't it?

Corpus by SalemWise reads the project files themselves (reports, specs, bid tabs, plan sets and RFQs) and answers in plain words with the document and page behind each claim, so a junior can open the page and check it. When the archive does not hold the answer, it says nothing is on file. It does not replace the walkthroughs or the relationships above. Set up for you: in full deployment we connect your network drives, SharePoint or ProjectWise and OCR scanned sheets during setup. No connector is ready-made; each is built for your archive during setup. The pilot needs no connection: it runs on a copy of your project PDFs. Set up for you: Corpus is cloud-agnostic. It runs on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or your own servers.

When is Corpus not the right answer?

• Your archive is small and tidy. If one person can find any project's files in two minutes, folder standards and a project index are enough.
• The knowledge is mostly relationships. If what you will lose is who to call, spend the year on introductions and shared pursuits, not software.
• The files are still paper. Scan the projects that matter first. Any search tool needs digital files.
• Nobody will use it. If senior staff will keep walking down the hall instead of asking a tool, the walkthroughs are the better investment.

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, table 11b, employed people by detailed occupation and age, 2025 annual averages, accessed October 14, 2026.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Civil Engineers, page last modified August 27, 2026, accessed October 14, 2026.
• ACEC Research Institute, The Workforce of the Future, October 2025: retirement and separation estimates and the succession recommendations, accessed October 14, 2026.
• Deltek help, Vantagepoint 7.0: Proposals tab on the project record, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek, "Keep Projects on Track: What's New in Deltek Vantagepoint", March 17, 2026: expanded Ask Dela reach, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek Vantagepoint 2026.1 release notes, release date December 19, 2025: contract documents in Ask Dela, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek Vantagepoint 2026.3 release notes, release date June 15, 2026: project files in the Contract Management grid, checked October 14, 2026.

Next step

Start with a free 30-minute call. Tell us where your archive lives and who is retiring in the next two years; if Corpus is not a fit, we will say so. If it fits, the next step is a $5,000 pilot on one real pursuit: about 2 to 3 weeks on a copy of up to 3 years of your project PDFs, credited toward setup if you sign a deployment within 60 days of the pilot's end. Full deployment is setup from $21,000, then $1,500–$2,000/mo. Book a free 30-minute call, read how the pilot works, or see Corpus.