Academic mentoring

What you'll do
In this session, we'll explore what mentoring is (and is not) and how to build developmental relationships to help realise an individual’s potential. Of course, mentoring can come in many forms and we’ll spend time thinking about how these roles might be most effectively conducted.

The session will consider the skills of mentoring and moving beyond a simple ‘advice-giving’ model – developing techniques such as consciously designing an alliance, listening, questioning and goal setting that will help you in your role as you develop and manage others.

Why attend
One of the key facets of professional and academic success, is to help to develop and empower those around you. Moreover, it is also vital for us to seek out the right people to help support and challenge us as we develop. Some development occurs formally, through training and supervision, but some happens in perhaps a less organised form, via mentoring and coach-like support.

Important to know
Pre-Thinking
In preparation for this session there is a small amount of pre-thinking that we’d like you to engage in. There’s is nothing onerous, nothing to submit and nothing that will take more than five minutes, but it will help you to get the most from our time.

There’s a lot of thought and talk about the overlaps between coaching, mentoring, supervision and other types of professional support. (You’ve probably been the recipient of some or all of them.) So if you had to quickly define it in a couple of sentences, what do YOU think mentoring IS and what is it definitely NOT?

What do you consider to be the core skills, qualities and attributes of an effective mentor?

After this session, you'll be able to:

• understand what mentoring is and what it is not
• recognise different forms that mentoring can take
• use key mentoring skills such as listening, questioning and goal setting
• think more clearly about how to build effective developmental relationships

This session is facilitated by Steve Hutchinson.