Mentoring Helps Mentors and Their Employers
Barbara Mills' protégé, Jessica Ruyle, was getting nowhere with her internship
applications. She'd sent her résumé through usual channels, including applying
online to Mills' employer, Sandia National Laboratories.
But Mills knew that Sandia could be a good fit for an electrical engineering
major interested in international experiences, so she took Ruyle's résumé
around.
Ruyle landed an internship - and Sandia got a good intern.
"It took a bit of effort, but it was worth it," says Mills, who works on
software for electrical systems. "This taught me that this is how people get
hired. It's not just a good-old-boy network, either. I was able to say that
this person is a hard worker, I've been mentoring Jessica, and I've known her
for over a year."
A Valuable Recruitment Tool
The story illustrates one of the ways mentoring can deliver real value to
companies whose employees mentor students.
"It's a good way to broaden recruiting," notes Mills. "It's a much better way
to recruit people because you get to know them over a long period of time. You
get to know their character, which is really important. You don't know as much
about their skills, but it's easier to evaluate skills in a short period of
time."
And, she notes, mentoring isn't expensive, in terms of either time or money:
"Setting up that pipeline could be really cost effective."
Even if protégés don't pursue careers at their mentors' workplaces, mentoring
helps educate students about career options, helps keep them on a science or
technical career path, and produces graduates who are better equipped for the
working world.
"It really helps keep these people going," says Mills. "So many drop off in
school and right after graduating. If they have a mentor, they can be more
informed, and have better ideas of what to do."
Producing a More Effective Employee
AT&T's Mary Fernandez, a longtime mentor who serves on MentorNet's advisory
board, agrees. She was mentored during her five-plus years of graduate school
through a mentoring program at AT&T.
"Mentoring had a big impact on my own graduate experience," she says. Her
mentor helped her weather the departure of the professor she had gone to
Princeton to study with and the subsequent dissolution of the database group.
"I think I got through it because of the external support that I had."
Her mentor advised her to switch fields, so she completed her Ph.D. in
programming language research instead of databases. And when she joined
AT&T, she wanted to give something back. The company is a founding sponsor
of MentorNet, and Fernandez has been with MentorNet since the beginning.
"It's enormously rewarding for me," says Fernandez, who has mentored six or
seven students through MentorNet. "And it has an unexpected benefit. Students
will ask you anything … and having that kind of dialogue [has] helped me
clarify what's most important about my job, [questions] about balancing family
and personal responsibility with my work, and how to do my job well.
Understanding what makes you tick is really important to being effective."