Assessment of mentoring on retention of workers and human resource management in the construction sector: A literature review

Mentoring is experiencing renaissance because business leaders not only identify the benefits of transferring knowledge among workers. Although mentoring theory, research and practice have begun to be developed, quite few articles on mentoring, retention have appeared in the Human Resource Development literature. The purpose of this paper is to look at research and practice on mentoring through the lens of Human Resource Development in the construction industry, to discover gaps in what is known about mentoring that are significant to Human Resource Development specialists and furthermore the study describes better practices that organizations can use to resolve the threat of lost knowledge caused by changing workforce demographics. The data used in the study was mainly qualitative, based on the historical data. The review enabled the road map to source out information related to human resource management and mentoring on retention of graduate’s workers in South Africa. After reviewing core aspect of mentoring, central to all domains of Human resource development, the authors summarize the key issues that had been studied regarding mentoring and career development, organization development, and training and development, proposing new direction for future research. The study also, indicated knowledge transfer assist workers in cultivating their skill sets which increases their marketability. Individuals who had been mentored reported high levels of knowledge transfer.