MENTORING IN PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS: A TOOL FOR CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Traditional mentoring that takes places between a mentor and a mentee who belong to the same organization has been professionally studied during the last four decades. In engineering discipline, mentoring has been used within companies in an intuitive and not very systematic way, mainly for knowledge management, transfer and also in order to develop key competences. In that sense, professional associations can play a fundamental role in the systematization of mentoring programs that help the integral development of engineers. The changing organizational environment determines that professionals must develop in wider facets and in a very rapid way. In response to the precedent need, new forms of alternative mentoring have arisen and represent an opportunity for engineers. That is why their implementation through professional associations should be studied, as other disciplines do already. This contribution presents the principal mentoring modalities that have been applied in the professional sphere and proposes the key elements for the implementation of inter-organizational mentoring systems through engineering professional associations as an additional way of providing added value to their collegiate members. The conclusions of this work show singular advantages for this type of alternative mentoring, that can be explained because of the need of the mentee to learn beyond his / her organization and because the nature of the relationship transcends to the organization itself. Likewise, a series of steps are proposed in order to follow the exploration of this alternative mentoring phenomena.