Leo Team
Jan 11, 2026
Why Your Best Engineers' Expertise Is Walking Out the Door.
The mechanical engineering workforce is getting older. Fast.
According to Data USA, the average age of male mechanical engineers in the US is now 41.3 years old, and 49% of all mechanical engineers are over 40. In manufacturing specifically, the average engineer age hovers around 42 to 43, with roughly a quarter of the workforce now 55 or older.
This wouldn't be a crisis if the pipeline of new engineers was keeping pace. But look at the graduation numbers over the past four decades, and a troubling pattern emerges.
The Graduation Gap: Four Decades of Data
The National Center for Education Statistics has tracked mechanical engineering bachelor's degrees since 1959. Here's what the data shows:
Decade | Representative Year | ME Bachelor's Degrees Awarded |
|---|---|---|
1980s Peak | 1985-86 | 16,194 |
Early 1990s | 1990-91 | 13,977 |
Late 1990s | 1995-96 | 14,177 |
Early 2000s | 2000-01 | 12,817 |
Late 2000s | 2008-09 | 17,352 |
Early 2010s | 2010-11 | 19,171 |
Late 2010s | 2018-19 | 36,817 |
Early 2020s | 2020-21 | 36,224 |
The good news: graduation rates have more than doubled since their low point in 2000-01. The bad news: those engineers who graduated in the 1980s and 1990s, now in their 50s and 60s, hold the bulk of institutional knowledge about what mechanical engineers do in practice. And they're retiring.
According to the National Association of Manufacturers, 82% of manufacturing workers who recently left their jobs did so to retire. This isn't a temporary workforce disruption. It's a permanent exodus of expertise.
What Gets Lost When Senior Engineers Leave
The real cost isn't the headcount. It's what researchers call "tribal knowledge," the hands-on, experience-based insights that don't exist in any manual but keep operations running.
A 2019 IEEE Pulse of Engineering report found that over 60% of engineers surveyed identified the loss of knowledge upon employee departures as "extremely" or "very" important to their business. A separate industry survey found that 97% of manufacturers express significant concern about the brain drain of retiring workers.
What does this knowledge loss look like in practice?
Consider the hydraulic assembly press that started overheating at a manufacturing plant fifteen years ago. A team of engineers figured out, through trial and error, that keeping oil temperature below 120 degrees Fahrenheit solved the problem. But the fix was never documented. Those engineers remain the only people who know how to solve that specific issue.
Or consider Boeing, which famously had to rehire hundreds of retired mechanics and engineers to address production problems on its 737 assembly line. When production ramped up, the company discovered that critical knowledge about assembly processes had left with retired workers.
The engineering design process depends heavily on this kind of accumulated wisdom. Knowing which tolerances actually matter for a specific application, understanding why certain material selections were made, remembering which design approaches failed in the past: this knowledge takes decades to accumulate and seconds to lose.
The Numbers Behind the Crisis
The data paints a stark picture:
26% of manufacturing workers are 55 or older, representing nearly 4 million workers approaching retirement
82% of manufacturing workers who recently left their jobs did so to retire
97% of manufacturers express significant concern about the brain drain of retiring workers
3.8 million new manufacturing jobs needed by 2033, with up to 1.9 million expected to go unfilled
The industries most affected are those with the highest concentrations of mechanical engineers. According to Data USA, motor vehicles and equipment manufacturing employs nearly 50% of all mechanical engineers, followed by machinery manufacturing at 24% and engineering services at 19%.
What Companies Are Getting Wrong
Most organizations treat knowledge transfer as a nice-to-have rather than a strategic priority. They wait until someone announces their retirement to start the handoff process. By then, it's too late to capture decades of nuanced understanding.
Traditional documentation methods fail because they can't capture the depth of expertise held by experienced workers. You can document a procedure, but you can't easily document the judgment calls, the workarounds for temperamental equipment, or the supplier relationships that took years to build.
The companies that successfully preserve tribal knowledge do three things differently:
First, they identify critical knowledge before it walks out the door. This means mapping which processes, equipment, and decisions depend on specific individuals' expertise.
Second, they build systems to capture knowledge continuously, not just during exit interviews. The best time to document why a particular design decision was made is when you're making it, not ten years later.
Third, they make institutional knowledge accessible. It's not enough to capture information. Engineers need to be able to find relevant answers when they need them, without digging through folders or waiting for someone to respond to an email.
How Leo AI Helps
Leo AI was built for engineering teams facing this challenge. It connects to your PLM systems and document libraries, making your organization's best practices and design decisions searchable and accessible, even after the engineers who created them have moved on.
For day-to-day work, Leo provides technical Q&A with cited sources, calculations with referenced formulas, and part search across your PLM and 120M+ vendor parts.
The tribal knowledge accumulated by your engineering workforce represents decades of hard-won expertise. As veteran workers retire, preserving this knowledge isn't optional. It's essential for maintaining quality, efficiency, and continuity.
The retirement wave can't be stopped. But its impact can be managed.
Sources
Data USA, Mechanical Engineers Profile: https://datausa.io/profile/soc/mechanical-engineers
National Center for Education Statistics, Degrees in Mechanical Engineering 1959-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_325.47.asp
ASME, When It Comes to Engineers, Demand Exceeds Supply: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/when-it-comes-to-engineers,-demand-exceeds-supply
IEEE GlobalSpec, 2019 Pulse of Engineering Survey: https://insights.globalspec.com/article/12725/2019-pulse-of-engineering-survey-retirements-resource-constraints-and-millennials-rising
Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, "Taking charge: Manufacturers support growth with active workforce strategies" (2024): https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/press-releases/us-manufacturing-could-need-new-employees-by-2033.html
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Mechanical Engineers: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mechanical-engineers.htm
National Association of Manufacturers workforce surveys
Cargoson, Manufacturing Jobs Analysis (2024): https://www.cargoson.com/en/blog/how-many-manufacturing-jobs-are-unfilled-in-the-us
Ready to protect your organization's engineering knowledge? Book a demo with Leo AI to see how we help engineering teams preserve tribal knowledge and answer technical questions with verified sources.
