Mentoring And Career Development

Mentoring has generated a great deal of interest in both the academic and practitioner communities. A keyword search using the term “mentor” results in over 1, 800 articles from the PsyInfo Database and over 81, 700 book titles on Amazon.com. It is clearly an area that piques our interest from both a professional and personal perspective. From a professional perspective, we try to establish the functions and outcomes of mentoring and to devise guidelines or programs that will help develop relationships that will result in positive individual career and organizational outcomes. From a personal perspective, we reflect upon the relationships that we have experienced, both as a mentor and a prote´ge´, and wonder if we managed those relationships as effectively as we could or should have. What is it about mentoring that catches and holds our attention? We think it captures our attention because mentoring holds both the great potential for enhancing career success as well as the possibility of contributing to career blunders. When mentoring relationships are good, they can produce beneficial career outcomes to mentors and prote´ge´s as well as to the organization(s) in which they take place. When mentoring is dysfunctional, it can be disastrous for the individuals and organizations involved. The articles in this special issue take the more optimistic view of mentoring, looking primarily at the potential career benefits of these developmental relationships. The topic of mentoring has certainly captured and held our interest for many years. We developed the idea of this special issue of Career Development International as the result of extended conversations with regard to continuing research in which we are both engaged on mentoring and careers. Given the number of unresolved issues with respect to the process of mentoring and mentoring research, we suspected there might be enough interest among researchers and practitioners to support a special issue on the topic. We were right but were surprised at the overwhelming interest in the topic. Over 50 manuscripts were submitted for this special issue, with articles of such high quality that editor Yehuda Baruch graciously agreed to a double special issue. Reading each manuscript submitted has certainly been a wonderful education, making usmore current in our knowledge about this phenomenon and enabling us to identify several key unresolved issues about mentoring and career development. The first issue is a fundamental one – what is “mentoring”? The definition, which originally incorporated a long-term time horizon, an emphasis on development of the prote´ge´, a hierarchical component, and a focus on a dyad, and was believed to occur relatively infrequently, has expanded to include many other possibilities. Mentoring is no longer viewed as necessarily long-term, as the changing nature of careers and organizations has caused many relationships to be of a