Description

Griffith Industry Mentoring offers three different mentor streams: Mentors based in Brisbane, Mentors based on the Gold Coast, and Mentors in all other locations. Students have similar streams, and register based on whether they are studying at one of our campuses or online. The Griffith Industry Mentoring Program is student-led, meaning the students, after completing the registration and training process (which includes reflection on their mentoring goals and tips on how to communicate with their mentor), navigate our system to search for and select their own mentor.  As students make their selection based on their own career development priorities, matches are more relevant, and thus more meaningful to the students. From 2017, Griffith Industry Mentoring will expand to run two cohorts per year, one in Feb-June and the other from July-November.

This added cohort makes participation in the Program more flexible for mentors and students and opens up more mentoring ‘spaces’ as student demand for mentoring currently outstrips the number of active mentors in our Program and continues to grow.

For on-campus students, the format of our program may best be described by calling it ‘an online mentoring program punctuated by face-to-face interactions’. Students participating in the campus-based programs attend an in-person Orientation with their fellow students, a large networking function held by the University, meet with their mentor roughly fortnightly primarily at the mentor’s place of work, and may even complete work experience with their mentor’s organisation as part of the Program. But, they have the added benefit of the tools the online system offers, such as virtual collaboration, scheduling, messaging and interaction logs. Further, all of the information exchanged by mentor and mentee in the online system is preserved, so that the student may re-visit it at any time.

For online students, students studying abroad or on exchange, or students interested in international career outcomes. The system offers the possibility of connecting with a mentor close to where they live, or working with someone in a region of interest. Students working with their mentor in online mode have access to all of the same collaboration tools as our local cohort, but primarily connect for their meetings via Skype.

Students have a number of development tasks to undertake as part of the Program, including creating a business card, negotiating a mentoring agreement with their mentor, goal-setting and assessing the progress of the relationship and leading a discussion about this with their mentor. Students who complete all of these activities, and meet with their mentor as agreed in their mentoring contract can participate in the Program for a second time.