Open Theses

Tacit knowledge refers to knowledge that a person possesses but may not be able to verbalise or explain. It is often intuitive and acquired through experience. Tacit knowledge plays a central role in the construction and environmental sector and can only be built up slowly and passed on from person to person through training or mentoring programmes. Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is documented or written knowledge and can be more easily reproduced and passed on. Studies indicate that tacit knowledge in engineering contributes significantly to a company's business success and that the expertise built up by an employee over the course of their career is largely tacit knowledge.

The aim of this thesis is to characterise tacit knowledge in engineering and to show ways of processing, storing and making use of this knowledge. First, tacit knowledge should be analysed as part of a literature review and differentiated from explicit knowledge. Subsequently, a concept is to be developed as to how tacit knowledge (e.g. transcripts from expert interviews or audio recordings) can be stored in various ways (e.g. with databases) and may need to be pre-processed for this purpose (e.g. with AI methods such as natural language processing). Finally, possibilities for making the implicit knowledge available to other people should be identified. In case of a Master thesis, the procedure identified as the best possible is to be finally demonstrated and evaluated through programming. In view of the current shortage of skilled labour, the findings from this thesis are important in order to retain specialist knowledge, especially that of employees leaving a company, and to be able to draw on it in the future.

Supervisor
Pascal Mosler, M.Sc.

Prerequisites
Knowledge of at least one programming language, ideally Python

Start
As of now