Mentoring has always been a part of the research environment – whether it’s dispensed over a drink at the end of a long day at a conference or a throw away line during a meeting with your supervisor.
So do formal mentoring schemes add any value? An independent evaluation of the Academy’s mentoring scheme, recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, says, ‘Yes!’
Athene Donald makes a compelling case for the value of (informal) mentors in one of her recent blog posts.
[A slight aside: if you make time to read one blog, her posts are consistently interesting and relevant to the research world, whether you’re a full time researcher or not!]
She describes the many and varied forms mentoring can take. I agree with much of what she writes – the mentor as ‘sounding board’, the need for people we can trust, who are kind and who are willing to give their time.
However, as the evaluation shows, our formal scheme has real benefits. It serves to ‘maximise the personal, professional and career development of early and mid-career academics’.
In our case, ‘mentees who reported having adequate time with their mentors and who described a warm, reciprocal relationship were more likely to report benefit. Meeting at least once a year and sessions that lasted at least an hour were also important’. Interestingly, ‘younger mentees report[ed] greater career impact than those aged over 45 years’ but ‘gender and career stage did not seem to matter’.
Of course, one study doesn’t prove beyond all doubt that structured mentoring is the solution to the challenges of career development! We have now initiated a longitudinal study of our mentoring scheme which will survey mentees before they start mentoring and at 1, 2 and 5 years.
Many early career researchers are unsure whether other researchers (particularly their seniors) will be willing to provide informal support. Additionally, for a whole host of reasons they may not be able to turn to their line manager/supervisor for advice. Without help, these individuals are surely less likely to achieve their potential. Formal mentoring schemes are therefore invaluable, I believe, in offering effective, structured support to researchers. Our evaluation would appear to back this up.
Nigel Eady has managed the Academy’s mentoring scheme for the last four and a half years and recently wrote ‘Ten things scientists should know about mentoring’.