The Importance Of Mentoring

Types of Mentoring and Benefits

What is mentoring? Mentoring is considered a target driven personal enhancement strategy where one person (mentor) facilitates the development of another person (mentee) through sharing of information, expertise, skills, values, attitudes, perspectives, and proficiency. Mentoring is a process that allows the mentee/learner to increase their knowledge and build skills that will help them to attain career-oriented goals. At the same time, it also provides an opportunity for the mentor to enhance their existing skill sets as well as attain further knowledge in a variety of areas through continuously reassessing and re-evaluating their knowledge and expertise areas.

Need for Mentoring

Is mentoring essential for career advancement or for achievement of personal goals? Mentoring is considered to be important for career and personal development and is a fairly common in certain like education in colleges or universities, sports and related activities, technical disciplines like engineering or medical science etc.  

A research conducted by "Leadership Oakland" revealed that if young people in the age group of 15-25 years are mentored then their performance can increase sufficiently. In fact, their probability of graduating with top honors can increase by 5 times. Similarly, without effective mentoring, children and young students in this age group are likely to lose their way and end up committing crime.

The result from the above research suggests that mentoring is important for young people and children who need a little bit of guidance, help, persuasion, knowledge, and empathy.

How Mentoring can help

Mentoring helps the mentor, the mentee, and the institution or organization that either one of them or both the people are associated with. Mentoring is gradually becoming popular in the corporate organizations and large businesses where more often than not, employees become a victim of stress and end up under-performing.

The essence of mentoring lies in bringing value to whoever is involved in the process. A research study carried out by INALSA revealed that mentoring helped in the personal and professional development of people or employees. The research stated that 25% of employees enrolled in a given mentoring program witnessed an increase in their performance accompanied with salary-grade change. At the same time, 95% of employees who were not enrolled in any mentoring program did not witness any change in performance, salary, promotion. The research also revealed that for those who participated in a mentoring program, their probability of getting a promotion increased by 6 times.

The results of this research goes on to show that how mentoring can help students, employees, and other individuals. Mentoring not only helps mentees improve in a specific area but also helps them to explore their potential in unexplored areas of personal and professional life.

Wishing you all the best,

FreelanceCoach Team