Why mentoring matters for career development and research impact
Guest post by Audrey J. Murrell
This post originally appeared on the Epigeum blog here.
To mark International Mentorship Month, Audrey J. Murrell, Ph.D. — lead advisor of the Epigeum’s upcoming ‘Mastering Mentoring’ program — explores the impact of mentoring and how intentional, well‑supported approaches can be beneficial for learning.
Mentoring has clearly been shown to be beneficial for career, leadership, and personal development. It is also a powerful tool for learning, knowledge sharing, and fostering supportive and inclusive environments. I have been studying, writing about, and working with organizations to enhance their use and impact of mentoring for almost three decades. During that time, I have been consistently impressed by the remarkable effect of mentoring across all types of relationships and within diverse organizations. Substantial research and my own work show that mentoring is a critical tool for effective personal, career, and leadership development. Mentoring is essential for providing opportunities to enhance personal growth, share knowledge, develop innovative solutions, and promote diversity and inclusion across different views and disciplines. It is also vital within educational environments as mentoring enhances learning, career development, knowledge creation, and innovation.
However, one aspect of mentoring that is sometimes overlooked is that there is no single, perfect type of mentoring. Mentoring relationships are as diverse as the people who are engaged in them. Our focus should be on creating “Intelligent Mentoring” that includes clarity of purpose, authentic commitment the work of mentoring and adequate resources that go beyond one-time programs that may lack the resources and commitment to sustain mentoring efforts and their impact. This begins with focusing on the diverse array of mentoring tools, structures and functions in order to select the specific approach to mentoring that will support your purpose and achieve your objectives.
Each type of mentoring can serve as a tool to support what is important to people and leaders to achieve impact. Traditional one-on-one mentoring is essential for individuals’ development and career effectiveness. Group mentoring often supports engagement and builds a sense of community among individuals with diverse backgrounds. Mentoring can also involve role modeling, in which leaders and other individuals serve as examples for others to learn from and emulate. Interestingly, reverse mentoring is an effective tool for knowledge sharing and innovation.
My recent work has focused extensively on the importance and effectiveness of peer mentoring. This involves individuals who may be at the same career stage or age, and such lateral relationships can help buffer status and power differences that would otherwise make mentoring relationships challenging. Peer mentors are valuable resources for sharing knowledge and ideas, providing leadership, offering support and encouragement, and building partnerships for collaboration. Another impact of peer mentoring is that it can serve as a valuable tool for bridging differences that may impede collaboration, thereby fostering a supportive and inclusive environment.
Peer mentoring is particularly effective for fostering collaborations across disciplines or areas of expertise. Throughout my career and leadership experience, access to knowledgeable individuals from diverse backgrounds, expertise, disciplines, and functional areas has been highly impactful. Sharing ideas, receiving feedback, and collaborating on solutions are uniquely facilitated by peer mentoring relationships. Clearly, there is much to learn and access across these diverse mentoring relationships.
We are continuing to learning more about the impact of mentoring through research, educational programs, and personal experience. Mastering Mentoring is designed to support the development of meaningful relationships and create a supportive and inclusive environment, which is especially important for researchers in the early stages of their careers. Mentoring opens doors and offers opportunities for growth by providing access to knowledge, resources, and networks, thereby helping to build equity across research environments. We hope this tool will be an important and effective resource to assist individuals throughout their journeys.
As we recognize the importance of mentoring this month, let us renew our focus on how this powerful tool can be most effective for supporting organizations and their stakeholders. It’s time that we practice “Intelligent Mentoring” which means three key commitments: developing clarity of purpose and desired outcomes, providing support that includes investing resources (people, time, and financial support) for the ongoing work for mentoring that is sustainable beyond one-time efforts.
Mastering Mentoring will be published in 2026. Visit Epigeum website to find out more.