Three Questions Every New Engineer Asks and No One Can Answer Quickly.

A new engineer joins the team. Day one. Motivation high, knowledge low. And then come the questions.

Why was it decided this way back then? Which standard actually applies here? Has anyone built this before?

Three questions. Every day. From every new team member. And the answers? They sit somewhere in project folders, in the heads of experienced colleagues, or in SharePoint structures no one has touched since 2017.

The problem is not a lack of knowledge. The problem is that no one finds it quickly enough.

Why is onboarding in engineering so slow?

In hardly any department is experiential knowledge as valuable as in engineering. Every decision builds on previous projects. Every tolerance, every material choice, every reference to a standard has a history.

New employees know this. That is why they ask. But the answers cost time. Not their own, but that of the experienced colleagues who are actually meant to be working on ongoing projects.

How big this search problem is, a survey by the strategy portal Cadenas shows: almost half of engineers spend at least one hour every day just searching for component and project information. For new employees who do not yet know the existing material at all, it is considerably more.

Every question from a new engineer costs an average of 15 to 30 minutes of a senior colleague. At three questions per day, that is over 300 lost hours per year. Per new employee.

Most companies accept this as a given. Onboarding just takes time. Six months, sometimes twelve, until someone is really productive. But does it have to be that way?

Why do wikis and manuals not work?

Everyone knows the usual approaches. Set up a wiki. Maintain a folder structure. Write a manual.

The problem: these systems only work if someone maintains them. And if the new employee knows where to search. Both rarely happen in practice.

Wikis go out of date after three months. Folder structures grow uncontrolled. And no one reads the manual, because it does not answer the specific question about the current project.

What is missing is not a better repository. What is missing is a system that understands questions and delivers fitting answers from existing documents.

Which three questions does every new engineer ask?

"Why was it decided this way back then?"

Behind every engineering decision sits a context. Perhaps a customer specification. Perhaps a manufacturing restriction or a supplier failure. This context is rarely documented. It lives in emails, meeting notes and the memory of individual people. It shows most clearly when a project passes from sales to project management: what was additionally agreed with the customer is often not in the requirements specification but in the email next to it.

When these people leave the company, the knowledge disappears. Irretrievably. What remains is a CAD model without explanation.

"Which standard actually applies here?"

DIN, ISO, EN. The body of standards in mechanical engineering is vast. New engineers often do not even know which standard might be relevant. Let alone what the current version says.

The search for the right standard costs not minutes but frequently hours. And if the wrong standard is applied in the end, it costs considerably more.

"Has anyone built this before?"

The most valuable resource in an engineering department is completed projects. Every solved problem, every proven solution saves time and errors the next time around. But only if you know about it.

In reality, new engineers often start from scratch because they have no access to relevant predecessor projects. Not because the data is missing. But because it cannot be found.

How does KoAssist answer these questions?

KoAssist searches existing project documentation, standards and internal knowledge bases. In seconds an answer comes. With a source reference.

No new system that has to be maintained. No laborious data migration. KoAssist works on the documents that are already there. PDFs, technical drawings, data sheets, internal standards.

The decisive point: every answer is traceable. The engineer sees where the information comes from and can decide for themselves whether to trust it. No black box, no hallucinations without context.

The fastest way to build new knowledge is no longer to read more. It is to ask better.

What does this mean for engineering managers?

The math is simple. If new employees become productive three months earlier, that saves not only ramp-up costs. It relieves experienced colleagues who no longer have to serve as a walking wiki.

At the same time, the risk of knowledge being lost decreases. KoAssist makes implicit knowledge searchable. What previously only the colleague with 20 years of experience knew is now available to the entire team.

For companies facing a skills shortage, this is not a nice-to-have. It is the basis for new employees being able to work efficiently at all.

Conclusion

Three questions. Every day. From every new engineer. The knowledge for the answers exists in every company. It just cannot be retrieved.

KoAssist changes that. Not by inventing new knowledge, but by making existing knowledge accessible. Fast, traceable, with a source reference.

Onboarding in engineering does not have to take six months. It only needs a system that answers questions as well as the most experienced colleague on the team.

Onboarding is one of many use cases. For the overview, see our topic hub AI in Engineering Design.

What new colleagues actually use for this is the knowledge assistant.

How new colleagues take over a running project through its profile and history is shown by the project memory.