What is mentoring?
THE RANGE OF POSSIBILITIES – Mentoring is an age old method of supporting development which we find in business, education, and all areas of life, with adults and with youth. For our purposes mentoring is for adults in professional settings. With that understanding, mentoring can occur any time during a career, but especially when someone seeks to learn from someone else who has experience in the topic for learning. This conception of career-long learning means that people in pre-employment education and training, new employees in orientation and training (what I call induction), experienced employees, middle managers, and executives should all have mentors. That list suggests that the goal is for everyone to be learning and working with a mentor. That is exactly what we are trying to define when we use the term “learning organization”. The fast-paced, competitive, and global nature of information flow, changes in business and other professional transactions, and new models for decisio
