Industry professionals as mentors: a model to guide mentor training

Industry professionals are playing increasingly important roles in the pre-professional development of engineering students. Professionals are serving as mentors, as team leaders, and as electronic mentors (ementors). As universities develop their learning partnerships with industry, the need to recruit and train mentors and team leaders will concomitantly increase. This current research, a work in progress, will examine the issues associated with identifying exemplary mentor characteristics and behaviors. While training is accepted as a part of mentoring programs, a model for mentoring training that is grounded in empirical investigation does not exist. In this study, we propose and test a model for mentor training.