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-304 (88%) students either agreed or strongly agreed that they would pursue their own CPD on return to fourth-year studies.
Lessons Learnt
Building Building a formal mentoring initiative into a 3rd year module with each mentee submitting a refelctive reflective report on their exeperince experience appears to work where it is ‘credit bearing’.
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Securing departmental cooperation from colleagues to build the reflective report into a robust and holistic PDP system would be best and this would ensure that the students have a longitudinal framework to enable them to become refelctive reflective practitioners from year 1 to graduation.
The mentees need to be reminded on several occasions that this is their opportunity to show their inititaive initiative and curiosity to potential employers (summer placememnt placement & graduate). Not all studenst students are sufficently sufficiently mature or confident / motivated to assume responsibility for their own learning so working on these attributes pre-mentoring woud would prove beneficalbeneficial.
Challenges
Health &Safety - whilst at the mentors work location the mentors are treated as vistors visitors and covered by the employers corporate insurance. Travel to and from the mentors work location is made by public transport and /or the mentees vehicles, all at the students expense. The students are briefed on car sharing and a need to be safe motorists while conveying peer students in their vehicles. Given the number number of journey itereations iterations for all students, it makes individual risk assessments impossible.
Occasional problems with mentors being unavailable for meetings and / or cancelling last minute due to work commitmmentscommitments.
Ensuring that all students developed a professional approach when in the company of industry and acted as ambassadors of the university. This was fine albeit some mentors suggested that their mentees were not sufficently curious not sufficiently curious and did not ask many questions.
Scalability
Whilts Whilst an ideal mentor-mentee ratio would be 1-1 the class size each year (average n=80) prevents this. Groups of mentees (n=4-5 per group) make it possible to secure around 20-22 mentors from local industry.
This session (2014-2015) it was noticeable that where more than one group of mentees were visiting the same company, the mentors would often double up the groups. As to be expected, mentees expressed concern about this issue and had a prefernce for a preference for the smaller group ratio that provided a more personal more personal contact with their individual mentors.To prevent this happening in the 2015-16 session I will only send one group of mentess mentees per company. Should the company provide more than one mentor then this will allow for breaking the group up and the mentees exposure to multiple engineers, perhaps from different disciplines.
Suggestions for Transferability
The emloyment employment of gradutes graduates (often Alumni) to act as mentors to UG/PG student mentees is now quite common throughout higher education. This approach is particulary particularly suitable for courses leading to a professional qualification and where the graduate mentors receive formal aknoledgement toweards acknowledgement towards becoming cgartred chartered engineers / accountants etc.
E-mentoring is also growing in poularity popularity and this removes some of the logistical and financial (time) barriers that could prevent face-to-face contact between the mentors & mentees.
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