You’re a young engineer working in a modern, fast-paced engineering firm and you have questions about your career—how to advance, what projects to take on, whether to take more classes, and so on. What do you do? You could ask your boss for suggestions, but that might be seen as evidence of being dissatisfied, even of considering another job. What you need is disinterested, unbiased advice from a more experienced person who has been in a similar position. In other words, you need a mentor.

Trouble is, in today’s world of engineering, mentoring is largely a lost art. As recently as 20 years ago, companies often trained new engineers by assigning them (either formally or informally) to more experienced colleagues for guidance. But sometime in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, the ranks of middle managers who made up the bulk of the mentors were drastically depleted in many industries. As a result, according to Bill Ratcliff, director-elect of Region 3 (southeastern United States) for 2006 and 2007, “mentoring networks got broken and have never since been repaired.” That’s the bad news.

The good news, Ratcliff says, is that mentoring techniques can be taught, even though in the old days they were most often simply passed along informally from mentor to protégé. The even better news is that the IEEE is now experimenting with two initiatives for rebuilding mentoring networks—and that preliminary results look promising.

DEVELOPING LEADERS  The older of the two initiatives was started in Region 3 as part of the region’s Leadership by Developing Others program, which seeks to create leaders within the IEEE. LDO includes training that encompasses such skills as team building, conflict resolution, project management, and interpersonal communications—all key elements of true leadership.

About two years ago, according to Charles Lord, the region’s leadership development chair, the Region 3 leadership realized that it would be beneficial to add mentoring to the mix of tools used to turn IEEE volunteers into IEEE leaders. So a pilot project was started to do just that. The first task was to determine what skills were needed to be an effective mentor. Then a beginning course was developed, which Lord uses to teach those skills. Training sessions can take anywhere from 90 minutes to most of a day.

The mentoring project began at the regional level, where the leadership helped pair up mentors and “mentees,” as protégés in the program are called. “After the success of that pilot project, we started approaching this at the area and council levels,” Lord says. More recently the Region 3 leadership has started to take the training to the section level.

Sessions are supplemented by two textbooks on mentoring, both by Gordon Shea. Mentoring, naturally enough, is aimed at mentors; the other, Making the Most of Being Mentored: How to Grow From a Mentoring Partnership, is, as its name implies, for mentees.

So far, Lord tells The Institute, feedback from everyone has been positive. As the program expands down to the section level, however, its instruction-intensive nature may limit its growth. “Like any other soft skill, mentoring tends to be a lab course rather than something you can get from a textbook or a lecture,” he says. “It takes person-to-person, hands-on training to truly learn the skills.”

Lord hopes that as the benefits of mentoring become increasingly apparent to more members, the concept will spread from the ground up without the need for special training by the regional leadership. Most questions he gets from participants in the program relate to taking the skills they’ve learned back to the workplace, so the motivation needed for grassroots propagation appears to be there.

And no wonder. As New York psychologist Jeffrey Rudolph explains, mentoring is beneficial not only to the mentee, but also to the mentor, since it helps satisfy a basic human desire to pass on the fruits of experience and help others. Mentoring is valuable, he says, not so much for passing on specific technical knowledge, but for teaching approaches to problem solving, which are hard—if not impossible—to get from a textbook.

SELF-HELP PROGRAM  In an effort to come up with a less labor-intensive way to sow and reap the benefits of mentoring, in May 2005 the IEEE Mentoring Program Pilot in Region 1 (northeastern United States) was rolled out. Unlike Region 3’s program, this one is not aimed at developing leaders but is intended to help members—especially young professionals—manage their own careers. It aims to help them with such issues as handling meeting dynamics, setting up agendas, juggling priorities, working well with other people, and setting realistic expectations at various stages in their careers. It also helps them find mentors on their own.

The mentoring pilot is set up so that mentees do most of the work in selecting their mentors using a Web-based software program. Potential mentors answer questions about their location, job title, IEEE member grade, technical competencies, management skills, and more. Would-be mentees fill out applications and profile forms about themselves and then select a mentor based on such criteria as geographic location, familiarity with a specific industry, and position within an organization. The first contact is then made via e-mail.

Basic training is delivered via an Internet conference by a trainer to both mentors and mentees, explaining their roles and responsibilities. In addition, a Web-based resource called The Library, which includes a mentoring guidebook, is also available to mentors and mentees.

The pilot program does not require face-to-face meetings. Communication is generally by phone and supplemented by e-mail. If both mentor and mentee have access, videoconferencing can be used. The program can easily cross geographic boundaries and has, in fact, been extended to members within Region 2 (eastern United States) and Region 3. At present, there are about 30 mentoring partnerships in the program, and initial feedback indicates that they are working well.

George Dobbins, an engineer at an electric utility in the Atlanta area, for example, is very happy with his mentor, Linda Wilbanks, chief information officer at the National Nuclear Security Administration, in Washington, D.C. He chose her in 2005 specifically because she is not in his industry and because she spent 
20 years as a teacher. What Dobbins values most about the relationship is his mentor’s knowledge of and perspective on the world, which are different from his.

For her part, Wilbanks is a strong believer in mentoring: she participates not only in the IEEE program but also in a similar arrangement at her organization. “Anytime you have a mentoring program, you have a good program,” she says. Her mentoring style is not so much to give advice as to offer insights based on her experience.

The one-year evaluation surveys for the pilot program are to be conducted in the third quarter of this year. The next step is to roll out the program to higher-grade IEEE members.

For more information about mentoring or to share your experiences, consider joining the new IEEE mentoring online community at https://www.ieeecommunities.org/ieee.mentoring.

Those living in Regions 1, 2, or 3 who may be interested in being part of the pilot program should visit http://www.ieee.org/organizations/rab/gold/mentoring.html.