About Mentoring

What Is Mentoring?

A Learning Collaboration—a developmental caring, sharing, and helping relationship with a focus on the enhancement of the protégé's or mentee's growth and skill development.

The word protégé or mentee is used to refer to the person who is being mentored. In this site, we will use the word mentee. The focus of mentoring is on the mentee's career and psychosocial needs.

Mentoring is just-in time help, insight into issues, and the sharing of expertise, values, skills, and perspectives. Mentors function as a catalyst-an agent that provokes a reaction that might not otherwise have taken place or speeds up a reaction that might have taken place in the future.

Benefits of Mentoring

Research on mentoring stretches back to the early 1980s. While there are differences in the way mentoring has been defined in these research studies, the overall findings are fairly consistent over the span of years. Research has documented the following benefits of career mentoring relationships:

• Enhanced career development and advancement of the mentee
• Enhanced compensation for the mentee
• Enhanced career satisfaction for both the mentee and the mentor
• Increased managerial productivity for those who are mentees
• Increased employee retention for the mentee

Triple Creek Associates, Inc., has published a great summary of mentoring benefits on their Web site at www.3creek.com/resources/booklets/BenefitsBooklet.pdf.