Academic Mentoring
Overview
Academic Mentoring Drives Strong Student-Alumni Engagement
Whether it’s freshmen to upperclassmen or alumni to students, meeting regularly with a mentor provides participants with a strong college connection while also delivering an avenue for campus or career advice. When it comes to faculty, mentoring is an efficient way to acclimate new professors to a different environment. Read on to see how mentoring can enhance your higher education institution.
Student Mentoring
Mentoring is a proven, cost-effective strategy to engage students in undergraduate and graduate programs. Student mentoring programs:
- Improve campus engagement and student retention
- Aid in career planning by providing job-specific information and potential career paths
- Build career networking skills
- Can assist with job placement after graduation
Student mentoring can take many forms: peer to peer, student to older student, and student to alumni. Some universities even create a “pipeline of mentoring” where new students are paired with a variety of mentors over their entire college experience.
Mentoring can achieve powerful results. One Chronus customer, for example, found that students are 40% more likely to secure a job after graduation when they’ve participating in a student-alumni mentoring program.
Alumni Mentoring
By creating an alumni-mentoring program, universities take advantage of alumni knowledge, offer current students with a chance to gain real-world advice, and help alumni form a tighter bond with the university and with each other. Alumni-to-alumni and alumni-to-student mentoring programs:
- Offer career networking opportunities
- Promote tighter engagement with the university
- Provide alumni with volunteer opportunities
Alumni mentoring programs can take many formats: from occasional meetings to a more structured mentoring workflow program. Either way, involving your alumni in a mentoring program provides extra value to their existing affiliation with your university.
See How Software Can Run Academic Mentoring Programs
Faculty Mentoring
With many faculty new hires, departments often invest one of their most valuable resources: a tenure-track faculty position. By mentoring new faculty members, universities can speed up time to productivity and improve their new employee experience. For existing employees, faculty mentoring promotes knowledge transfer and envelopes employees in the unique university culture. Faculty mentoring programs:
- Encourage faculty career development
- Improve employee engagement and retention
- Help new faculty members adapt more quickly
The Challenges of Running University Mentoring Programs
Many university mentoring programs are manually run with spreadsheets, internally developed software, or sometimes even SharePoint. Challenges we typically see with these programs include:
- Matching new groups of students or faculty at once in bulk is time-consuming
- Inability to support a variety of mentoring styles: occasional “flash” mentoring or full programs with goals and workflows
- Inability to easily report and share results for program visibility and continued funding
- Drop-off in program participation after initial excitement
- Complicated methods to connect participants who may live across states and time zones
Solve these issues and take your university mentoring to the next level with software.
Mentoring Software Makes Running Mentoring Programs
for Universities Easy
Start a new program or revitalize an existing program with mentoring software. Purpose-built to manage the goals of a university mentoring program, Chronus software provides a flexible, customizable platform for productive networking, learning, and measurable results. Mentoring software delivers:
- Flexible matching – match in bulk or enable self-matching
- High participant engagement – goals and tasks improve participation and productive learning
- Reduced admin time and cost – software tools streamline and automate program management
- Social and mobile – Skype, a mobile app and other social tools make mentoring easy on the go
- Scalability – scale as needed to students and alumni around the world
- Measurable results – Deep program metrics demonstrate success to your university