Guide to implement an intersectoral mentoring programme
In 2021, we established the first pan-European intersectoral mentoring programme, named REBECA by EURAXESS (REsearchers BEyond aCAdemia). REBECA by EURAXESS put in touch ESRs working in academia, with highly skilled professionals related to R&D&I performing in non-academic enterprises or institutions, as well as professional profiles in academic institutions other than researchers. The aim of the programme was to facilitate the awareness and reflection of the ESRs on their professional perspectives beyond the traditional academic research career, and to engage non-academic stakeholders.
This toolkit intends to be a useful step-by-step guide for those institutions wanting to deploy similar programmes for their ESRs. In the following sections, useful information and real examples based on our experience will be shared, together with tools and resources. Detailed results of the REBECA by EURAXESS and previous REBECA mentoring programme editions can be found here.
If you are planning to run an intersectoral mentoring programme, think about the barriers that hamper researcher career transitions and define achievable goals to mitigate them.
If you are looking for inspiration, these were the goal of REBECA by EURAXESS mentoring programme:
- Support young researchers in their reflection on their career goals, skills and professional options.
- Facilitate intergenerational, intersectoral and intercultural networking of research professionals.
- Support young researchers to get exposed to other professional careers by the hand of highly skilled professionals.
- Facilitate talent transfer from the academic sector to the private sector.
- Build stronger relationships between the academic sector and the private sector.
You must take into account these factors to decide what is the best calendar to achieve the goals of the programme:
- The length of the programme. More extended programmes allow pairs to meet at their own pace, but have the inconvenience of increasing dropout rates and making monitoring more difficult.
- Suggested and required meetings. It is advisable to set up a minimum of required meetings to accomplish the programme and the best number of meetings between pairs to achieve the goals. Then, you need to facilitate enough time to perform the meetings. A good ratio is to allow 1 month per meeting to occur.
- Vacational periods. You can expect a decrease in the pace of meeting during vacations and difficulties in monitoring.
We proposed to run a 6-month programme along which pairs were prompted to meet at least six times. We tried to avoid running the mentoring phase over Christmas and summer vacations expecting difficulties in monitorization and engagement of participants, but due to project constrains, the launching of the programme was in mid-February 2022 and the mentoring period lasted until mid-August 2022. rebeca_by_euraxess_mentoring_programme_calendar.pdf
These events provide opportunities to upgrade skills of participants, to network, to engage with participants and generate community
It is important to think what type of events you would offer, whether assistance is mandatory or not, the approximate dates of delivery and create an event calendar to share with participants early on during the mentoring phase. This not only will facilitate the increase of participation but also will set up the expectations regarding the organization towards participation, especially for the events that are mandatory. This calendar also will allow you connect with running activities related to the topic of your mentoring programme and signposted there. Check the
rebeca_by_euraxess_mentoring_programme_calendar_0.pdf
The general experience of mentoring programmes is that meeting in person –like any kind of networking opportunity– can favour successful mentoring relationships. However, this is not possible in cross-border or multi-institutional mentoring programmes.
Learn how we decide the type of meetings of REBECA by EURAXESS mentoring programme
Individual meetings and events were all run virtual in REBECA by EURAXESS mentoring programme, although participants were informed about the benefits of having physical meetings if conditions allowed for them.
You should take into account the career stage of the mentees. Although it is tempting to think that postdocs have more knowledge about their career options beyond academia than PhD candidates or recently received a PhD, the fact is that these professionals have been longer in academia without professional links with non-academic sectors and/or move to other countries limiting their time resources to explore opportunities outside of academia.
We targeted PhD candidates and PhD holders (up to 8 years after obtaining the title). Candidates from any discipline were welcome and women were especially encouraged to apply. ofile of REBECA by EURAXESS mentoring programme.
You need to decide on several characteristics of the mentors
- Experience of the mentor in non-academic sectors. Do you want strict non-academic professional or are academics collaborating with non-academic sectors valid?
- Seniority of the non-academic sectors. Do you require a minimum number of years outside of academia?
- Past relation with academia. Do you want your mentors to be PhD holders or not?
We decided to be very open when it comes to mentor profiles. We basically wanted to create a diverse network of professionals with connections to research, development and innovation. We targeted STEM, social sciences or humanities professionals working in industry, government, third sector and even academia, but not in research positions or having some link with the private sector (e.g., start-ups). Although having a PhD or have a background knowledge on academic research was not compulsory, it was highly acknowledged.
Our recommendation is that you secure some mentors before defining the size of the programme, even if planning a public call, so you can make sure that the programme will happen with reasonable figures of participation. If you have plenty of mentors, scaling up the pairs have the downsized of resources dedication. Approximately 100 pairs take 3 person months of management efforts for a 6 month programme.
Our initial target was 50 pairs. Due to the success in the number of mentors applications, the final number of pairs arranged was 102 based on good matches identified.
It is not easy to start conversations between pairs in a mentoring programme from the scratch. It is advisable to create material to:
- to facilitate guidance during the programme,
- engagement of the pairs and
- to spark conversations during one-to one meetings.
We have created a key document easy-to-use handbook. This handbook covers the following topics: the concept of mentoring programme, mentoring skills and how to prepare and approach mentoring meetings (with particular focus on the importance of intercultural communication), suggested topics important for career development including referenced literature, and a career development plan template to voluntarily self-report their progress. The handbook also includes a reminder of events happening during the mentoring phase, and access to the post-meeting forms (see Monitoring and Evaluation section).rebeca_by_euraxess_mentoring_handbook_0.pdf
Think on a catchy name! Even though this intersectoral mentoring programme has changed from previous editions, we kept the brand name. Our experience is that naming our programme helped us a lot in the communication and dissemination phase, especially as we had to address professionals in sectors which traditionally have not been too aware of EURAXESS. Indeed, we have named REBECA by EURAXESS not only this mentoring programme, but also other activities related with the topic of intersectoral mobility (community platform and matchmaking events), providing a great platform to showcase other elements of the Careers Beyond Academia EURAXESS-Hub.
To design a mentoring programme, we recommend to:
- Be as specific as possible in the definition of your goals and targeted group.
- Create material and events to support your pairs towards achieving those goals. See Annex 1 REBECA by EURAXESS Handbook for inspiration.
- Consider creating a catchy brand / name for the programme, especially if addressing target groups that are not your usual customers.
Key aspects of selection and matching process
We identified two aspects to run a successful programme: the quality of mentees in terms of motivation and their commitment to their professionally grow, and the matching success.
Even you have the perfect pair, this can go wrong because of the motivation and false expectations of mentees. In our experience, although it is more difficult to recruit mentors, it is more difficult to keep mentees engaged along the programme. We identified several factors that could lead to disengagement of mentees: misunderstanding on what mentoring is and what to expect from your mentor, the commitment to invest enough time on the programme to be effective, and their readiness to explore other careers. You can provide them with training along the programme to motivate them and upskill certain self-time management and career planning skills, but certain individuals will be reluctant to change behaviour. If you do not put strong efforts in selection more than the general criteria, the undesired scenario of mentees abandoning the programme and wasting valuable mentors could happen.
In REBECA by EURAXESS we prepared two separately simple, yet detailed registration forms for mentors and mentees, which we asked all our candidates to fill in during the application in order to help us do the selection and matching. Check our registration form mentees. annex_7_rebeca_application_for_mentees.docx
After the closing of call, we carried out the selection as follow:
As shown in the registration form, we foresaw this selection phase in advance, so we evaluated candidates according to their already awareness of non-academic careers CV giving more weight to those that were submitted a more skilled focus CVs rather than academic CVs (20 points); their awareness and readiness to talk about their careers outside of their topic and the main focus of academic career (ability to explain their research in plain words) (20 points), their motivation to apply (20 points), their opinion about the barriers to move to industry (20 points), their knowledge about mentoring (skills they thought they could bring to the programme) (20 points), and job/recruitment expectations from the mentors (which automatically discarded the application).
Within the same range of scores among the candidate mentees, a gender, geographical and discipline balance in regard to the applications received was applied. For this, several evaluations were done collectively by the REBECA by EURAXESS team as a reference for homogeneity. Next, each person in the team reviewed a share of the applications to obtain a ranked list of potential mentees.
The same is not true for mentors. In our experience applicants to become mentors understand the mentor role. They are usually senior enough to have good self-time management skills and their motivation is very high. Nevertheless, it is worth checking their mastery in mentoring, to be prepared to provide training. If you are running a cross-border mentoring programme, make sure their speak the common used language of the programme in a confidence way to be effective mentors and that they have notions of intercultural communication or international experience.
In REBECA by EURAXESS we prepared two separately simple, yet detailed registration forms for mentors and mentees, which we asked all our candidates to fill in during the application in order to help us do the selection and matching. Check our registration form mentors.
rebeca_application_for_mentors.docx
After the closing of call, we carried out the selection. The evaluation of mentors was more open since we wanted to have a good number of fine mentors in order to do the best matching available. Thus, during the evaluation we basically discarded ineligible applicants, academic professionals not related with a non-academic sector, very unexperienced professionals, and those not showing a clear commitment to the programme in their answers. All mentor applications were reviewed by all members of the REBECA by EURAXESS team.
It is also useful to give different weight to the criteria applied for the matching as not always all would be possible. For example, one criterion could be matching based on the stronger interests of the mentee and areas of expertise of mentors, other could be the same background discipline, and a third one, could be the mentee’s potential for developing skills either because the mentor has an extensive network to provide support and feedback (even though is not an expert) or that the mentor is highly experienced in coaching. Within these 3 criteria, you can give more weight to shared interest and expertise, then potential sharing of mentor’ network or the provided coaching, and finally the shared background disciplines. Make sure you think about these criteria before the application phase, so you gather all the necessary information from both mentors and mentees as they register for participation.
There are some ready-to-use software programmes that can help you do the matching in an automatic way (you need to feed the software with the matching criteria you will use). This can be a good investment if you are running a big programme or not in a cohort basis, but it is not of essence to start with. Also, a “human matching”, although slower, may take into consideration some intangibles and intuitions that could work.
Once we had the preselection of mentees and the mentors, the team paired their share of mentees with any mentor from the total pool of mentors. The criteria to match the selected participants were:
- Professional interests
- Topics to be tackled in the programme, and
- Potentiality of career with mentor network and supporting experiences
- Applicability of the research activity of the mentee with the area of expertise of the mentor
- Shared background discipline
- International experience
Some of the pairs were “perfect matches” on paper, while some others had a bit more diverse interests. Nevertheless, a message we stressed among our candidates from the very beginning was that the mentoring was meant to open horizons and get to know different professionals, in order to manage their expectations as best as possible. The tables below provide the list of the first and second matching criteria found in REBECA by EURAXESS mentoring.
| Topics |
|---|
| Professional career expectations |
| Exploration of options beyond academia |
| Career development needs for moving beyond academia |
| Career decision making |
| Developing career strategies |
| Networking |
| International careers |
| Team management |
| Communication |
| Gender issues |
| Achieving a good work-life balance |
| Seeking a job from mentor (excluding answer) |
| Other |
Once we had the 102 pairs established, we emailed each of the selected participants announcing they had been matched and calling them in for the virtual kick-off meeting. The introductions of each pair were only done after the kick-off meeting. This allowed for some flexibility for any last minute drop-offs and also increased the willingness to be in the Kick-off meeting which is a key milestone to balance the expectations of all participants (see section Mentoring Phase for more information).
- Think about the matching process when designing the registration process. See the registration forms used in REBECA by EURAXESS.
- Be careful in managing the expectations of the people applying to the programme at the point of the selection, but also at the point of the matching.
Key elements during the mentoring phase
For all this to happen, we identify these key elements during the mentoring phase:
This meeting is important so that coordinators of the programme can explain the basics of mentoring, the goals of the programme, resources available and, of most important, what are the responsibilities of participants. For instance, it is crucial that mentees understand that it is their responsibility to lead the contacts and arrangement of the meetings with their mentors, etc. This kick-off is important for you to motivate participants and make sure everyone is on the same page. The kick-off also allows all participants to get to know the organizers of the programme to build trust and ensure as much as possible that if something is not working properly in the relationship, they can reach out for support. Last but not least, this launching meeting is also key to address any queries from the participants, especially due to the fact that you need to balance the aims of the programme with some flexibility to allow each pair to focus on the specific topics and elements that are more relevant for them.
We run the same virtual meeting event for mentors and meeting together. We focus on general elements of mentoring, and intercultural communication. We tried to set up expectation and explain phases of mentoring to the attendees. This was completed with a review of the communication protocols established particularly highlighting that it was the mentees’ obligation to lead all communications with the mentors. Finally, we provided an introduction to the REBECA Handbook recommending how to make use of it, and reminding them that there was some flexibility on what to focus their discussions as long as it was within the scope of REBECA. We offered two different days on different time slots to maximize attendance. We strongly emphasized the importance of participating live to allow participants to share their questions and ensure that we were all on the same page at the beginning of the mentoring period. In addition, a recording of all webinars was made available to the programme participants either for those few who could not make it in any slot, or for future consultations.
Ideally, you should create a handbook of the programme that participants can refer to which proposes specific aims and topics within the scope of the programme. In addition, it is also a good practice to provide mentees with some sort of document that allows them keep record of their progress, conclusions, contacts, etc., obtained from their discussions with their mentor.
We facilitated participants with the presentation thrown by the organizers and the mentoring experts, the handbook and the personal career plan template. We emphasized our availability for any query along the whole duration of the programme.
These events are also a great opportunity to engage collaborators. As explained in the Design phase, it is worth to plan these events well in advance of the programme and shared a Calendar Event with participants. These events are a great opportunity to get in board collaborators and enrich the programme while strengthening links with other collaborators.
Mentoring skills, highlighting active listening or intercultural communication are relevant topics to offer training in for a cross-border mentoring programme as REBECA by EURAXESS. Although this training can have a major impact in the success of the programme, voluntary attendance must be considered. We follow a role not to push mentors into activities, because they have already made a very altruistic gift just by participating in the individual meeting with mentees.
Training several skills and tools can be a great asset for the professional development of mentees, but also they can be considered as an opportunity to give mentees tools and topics to conduct their individual meetings with their mentors and create their own development plan. Although practical topics as non-academic CV writing create great expectations by participants, it is better to start with more motivational and self-reflect tools to have impact in their professional development.
These are impactful short events where a selected mentors share with all mentees a career topic or trajectory. Ideally, these events should be conducted in an informal atmosphere and encourage the maximal interaction.
Other types of events that encourage networking is always an effective way to create community and engage participants, especially in the framework of a programme which is essentially virtual such as this one.
These events try to put in contact representatives of companies with researchers in a fair set up. These events give the opportunities to companies to present their activities, and access the pool of researchers, while researcher broad the network, and explore different opportunities outside of academia in the private sector.
Training for mentees. Based on the experience of other mentoring programmes, the design of REBECA by EURAXESS included three compulsory online workshops for mentees: i) Create your professional identity ii) Preparing a non-academic CV, and iii) Intellectual Property Rights. The first two were provided by career advisers, and the third one through the IP EU Help Desk. The level of satisfaction of the first two seminars was measured through a quick survey upon finalising the session. These two REBECA by EURAXESS online workshops got an average score of 3,9 over 5 of usefulness and 7,6 over 10 of intention of recommendation, and 4,2 over 5 usefulness and 7,6 over 10 of intention of recommendation, respectively.
Career events. Two career events were organized. We aim with these events at exposing mentees to different professional profiles and diverse career trajectories. The first event was dedicated to careers in industry. In it, 6 mentors talked in a roundtable about their professional activity and career trajectory. They were selected trying to obtain a representation of different departments and profiles of researchers in industry from R&D departments to marketing and sales or regulatory affairs departments. The other event was dedicated to the public sector. With the same set up, 5 selected mentors again talked about their daily activities and their career trajectories.
Networking events. Two networking events were organized, once one for mentor and for mentees. We try to do this meeting as much interactive as possible in a very casual atmosphere. The topic for mentors was sharing their experiences and inquiries, and for mentees was to their careers and getting to know each other games.
R2B matchmaking events. We incorporated a REBECA by EURAXESS virtual matchmaking fair as part of our offer, although participation was not excluded to mentees of the programme and organization was not run by us, this is an example of collaboration. Mentors were also encouraged to promote these fairs among their companies and were surveyed in the registration forms about their interest on these events.
Closing event. This is also an important event, specially aiming to create community and alumni for possible related events. We run an event at the end of the programme addressing with humour the organizational frauds, surprises and good news that we have during the programme. We also facilitate through games the reflection and the implementation of the lessons learned during the mentoring programme to their future career endeavours.
Many participants of mentoring programmes highly value networking, and they like to be more in touch with other participants. You can consider providing communication channels or networking platforms but weight your capacity to efficiently encourage and maintain participation in it.
Networking platform or communication channels. As explained in the introduction, the REBECA by EURAXESS mentoring was complemented with additional project activities under a common branding such as the R2B matchmaking event mentioned above. In addition, a LinkedIn Showcase page was established with name Researchers Beyond Academia by EURAXESS- A journey towards research careers outside universities. This showcase page has the objective of launching a community of EURAXESS alumni having received EURAXESS support, with a strong focus on intersectoral mobility. This provided us with platform to advertise activities connected to the mentoring (e.g., the call for mentors and mentees), but was also used to share results of activities of the mentoring (e.g., the career panels organised with mentors), apart from all kind of relevant information which could ultimately foster discussion within the pairs. A Guide for creating and running an EURAXESS alumni community can be found here. Furthermore, a closed group of LinkedIn only for mentors and mentees was also established as a potential platform for the participants to communicate among themselves, complementing the advertising and promotion strength of the showcase page.
- A launching meeting is essential to manage the expectations of the participants.
- Plan additional training activities and networking meetings for participants along the mentoring period.
- Use events, training and digital platforms to foster collaboration around research beyond academia topic
- Prepare resources to facilitate the discussions of the pairs.
Actions to achieve and effective monitoring and a high quality evaluation
Periodic emails with important information, save the dates for the events that are part of the programme, surveys, reminders or even personal emails to pairs that are not meeting will minimize pairs that abandon the programme. It is important that organizers do not “disappear” after the kick off assuming that every pair will run smoothly. If you are using parallel networking platforms, you can post information related to the topic, but not directly related to the programme, for example, job post, interesting articles, internships, training, career events, etc.
It is worth highlighting that individual communication also requires a significant amount of time and resources, especially trouble shooting of communications or misunderstandings. One major challenge of email communication is landing in spam folders, so when noticing that a pair is not even getting the first contact, blame spam firewalls and make sure you actually have established properly communication channels. Sometimes it is necessary to connect trough other channels to ensure proper establishment of communication. The closed LinkedIn group for participants mentioned above, was a nice alternative for “lost” emails.
It is also recommendable to count with an expert on career advice or mentoring relationship to assist mentors who may experiences difficulties to take their mentoring relationship to deeper levels of support.
We communicate with participants an average of 2 times per week. These emails were most of the time related to events during the programme, whether registrations, reminders, saving the dates of upcoming events, etc. These emails were also used an opportunity to encourage them to meet with mentors and to filling up progress reports. These emails were always sent hiding the recipients to avoid sharing contacts.
Through both, the closed LinkedIn group and the showcase page, we published job offers or relevant articles about career transition.
It is important that you know almost real time which pairs met and which not to detect any potential issue pairs are having. This is challenging as many reporting systems do not reflect on the reality. Be wary about the fact that monitoring the occurrence of meetings is completely independent of the contents addressed during the meetings. Privacy is a major issue in any programme as the mentoring pairs should offer safe spaces for open and transparent discussions.
As for monitoring tools, we created 6 very simple online forms that we asked mentees to complete after each meeting they had with their mentors. You can find the structure of the forms in REBECA Post-meeting form. We just asked very brief information about the meeting, avoiding any details about the content of their discussions, in order to help us monitor how pairs were doing. These forms allowed us identifying pairs that were not running smoothly and could need some additional support to implement the programme. They also provided us information about the main topics addressed during the meetings in order to include additional activities during the programme or identify areas of improvement in the support material offered. You can find the structure of these forms in Annex 9 REBECA by EURAXESS post meeting online form.
rebeca_mentoring_post-meeting_forms.docx
To encourage filling the forms, reminders were nearly always included in any communication with participants. We also set up a limit of 4 filled post meeting forms to obtain certification of programme performance.
Literature concludes that mentoring is really a two-way relationship that will definitively have an impact not only in mentees, but also in mentors. Measuring impact is different from measuring satisfaction. On top you would also like to learn how to improve your mentoring programme. With these three conditions in mind, you should think about how two measure them. These are some of the tools you can use:
- A longitudinal evaluation with survey at the beginning and at the end of the programme will allow you to measure the progression in several relevant factors.
- A follow up satisfaction survey run at the end of the programme will allow you to gather quantitate information about how the programme ran.
- Interviewing some participants or focus group will let you gather more detailed information that can be used as a source of inspiration for solutions.
We developed a longitudinal questionnaire with two points of measurement at the beginning and at the end of the programme to measure impact on mentees, as well as met expectations of mentors.
For mentees, we evaluate the impact of the programme on career awareness, career management skills of the mentees, shaping their interest towards non-academic careers. We measure at the beginning and at the end using a Likert scale questionnaire the following factors:
- awareness of opportunities outside of academia,
- awareness of the value of research experience and transferable skills outside of academia,
- awareness of their skills in professional development planning, and
- interested areas of professional performance.
This questionnaire is combined with a general satisfaction survey and a measure of usefulness of the whole programme, particular events and training offered, and resources provided. All the results will feed into the hub online toolkit for researcher careers beyond academia.
You can find the templates used for mentors and mentees in REBECA by EURAXESS Final survey
- Find a way to show the participants that you are there. Be careful with not overwhelming the participants with emails, but be regular in your communication. Setting a reminder in your calendar helps!
- Try to the best of your possibilities to set up a “live” monitoring system to try to identify as soon as possible.
- Privacy matters. Send mass emails with the recipients hidden and avoid asking detailed questions about the mentoring relationship.
- Plan carefully your surveys to have a good measure of the impact of the programme
The programme does not run on its own. You need to make sure you have someone constantly checking the meetings between pairs are taking place, keeping in touch with the programme participants through periodic emails including reminders, interesting activities or simply saying hello if there. Find a balance between being more or less regular, but not overwhelming the participants.
Mentoring programmes are based on the willingness of sharing fears, doubts and dreams of all participants and on the altruism of mentors aiming at sharing their experiences and knowledge so they can help others grow and get to know themselves better. We tried to embed this energy in all our communications to participants so we all felt that we were doing something useful and generous.
There are always things you haven´t foreseen in the design of the programme that can be included relatively easy if you know them in real time.
We have had informal conversations with a number of participants and we have included their suggestions (such as a mid-term evaluation to mentees to identify their degree of satisfaction with mentors, a joint virtual meeting of mentors, or the webinar about how to face a job interview).
Mentoring is a skill that can be further develop, take advantage on this. Specially an unexperienced mentors tend to play the mentor role of advice giver based on their own experience and knowledge of the ecosystems. However, when paired with people residing in other countries, they can feel as their knowledge is not relevant and lose confident in their mentoring skills. It is worth to train mentors in the different aspects of mentoring and help them to adopt different roles depending on the demands and developmental needs of their mentees.
Each pair is going to have its own sensitivity and it´s going to focus on certain aspects of the suggested topics. By offering common activities to all the mentors and the mentees of the programme, you make sure there is a common goal for everybody. Career panels showing the diversity of career trajectories worked really well for our mentees.
A mentoring programme is almost craftwork. Make sure the size of the programme is manageable for the staff working on it. You do not want to waste the effort of designing a mentoring programme because you failed to answer an email.
Mentoring demands dedication not only to meet the mentor or mentee, but to read, self-reflect and prepare questions. Participants should be enough motivated to allocate the time within everyone busy agenda. Make sure your participants understand what mentoring is and the time needed for it.
According to our experience, a mentoring programme for early stage researchers wanting to reflect about their career options and to know better different career paths for researchers can be very exciting and unrealistic goals can be set. Make sure they understand the goals of the programme so they can seize their expectations accordingly.
Make sure participants understand that sometimes pairs don´t click for different reasons. Maybe one of both suddenly get busier and it is impossible to for them to meet or there is simply no feeling.
Probably the best way to go is not to commit to reallocate a mentor or mentee that lost their pair but to do your best effort to do it. Ideally, you may want to have a list of mentors and mentees ready to jump in if necessary.
It is of essence to evaluate the impact the programme had in both the mentor and the mentee. Make sure you have a complete survey that participants fill at the beginning and at the end of the programme. It will help you fine tune the next edition of the programme and, if results are good, spread the word among other departments or institutions.
If things went ok, you will probably have a group of participants that had a good time during the programme and that somehow want to stay in touch.
You may want to create an online community in Facebook, LinkedIn or alike. Members will be able to exchange job offers and interesting information and, also, it will be good for you as organizer to try to enrol new mentors for future editions.