Benefits of mentoring

Both graduate students and faculty mentors derive a number of benefits from a successful mentoring relationship. Long range benefits to protégés who enter both business and academic professions include accelerated promotion rates, greater career mobility, higher overall salaries and compensation packages, greater personal and career satisfaction, enhanced professional confidence and self-esteem, decreased role-stress, reduced work-family conflict, and a sense of enhanced power within the organization (Johnson, 2003).

Active mentors report enhanced career satisfaction and fulfillment, creative synergy and career rejuvenation, loyal support from previous protégés, and organizational recognition for skill in talent development.

Mentoring enables graduate students to:

  • acquire a body of knowledge and skills
  • develop techniques for collaborating and networking
  • gain perspective on how a discipline operates academically, socially, and politically
  • acquire a sense of scholarly citizenship by grasping their roles in a larger educational enterprise
  • deal more confidently with the challenges of intellectual work

Mentoring enables faculty members to:

  • engage the curiosities and energies of fresh minds
  • keep abreast of new research questions, knowledge, paradigms, and techniques
  • cultivate collaborators for current or future projects
  • identify and train graduate assistants whose work is critical to the completion of a research project or successful course offering
  • prepare the next generation of intellectual leaders in the disciplines and in society
  • enjoy the personal and professional satisfaction inherent in mentoring relationships