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.
Mentoring is a proven, cost-effective strategy to engage students in undergraduate and graduate programs. Student mentoring programs:
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.
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:
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.
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:
Many university mentoring programs are manually run with spreadsheets, internally developed software, or sometimes even SharePoint. Challenges we typically see with these programs include:
Solve these issues and take your university mentoring to the next level with software.
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: