Mentors and Mentoring: What is a mentor?
Mentors A friend of mine called the other day to tell me he had been promoted to Engineering Manager for a large, national, environmental services and consulting firm. I shared his good news and thought to myself about the years we had worked together. I remembered the day I hired him as a field engineer, his first professional job. He has worked hard to get where he is. He is intelligent and good with people. He was a quick study and I enjoyed sharing my experience and knowledge with him. I may have been his first mentor, but I wasn’t his last. Yet it got me to thinking about the importance of mentors. So, in a series of feature articles over the next few weeks, we will look at what a mentor is, how to find one, and how to be a mentor. I would welcome your thoughts and stories on this topic as well. Feel free to email them to me. History The original Mentor is a character in Homer s epic poem The Odyssey. When Odysseus, King of Ithaca went to fight in the Trojan War, he entrusted the
