Despite frequent job moves by younger professionals, employers should not scale back on their mentoring efforts, according to scholars at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, younger workers must be aggressive in seeking out mentors.

"Many workers today hold positions at multiple companies during their careers, and may feel no particular loyalty to remain at any organization for any great length of time. By the same token, many companies feel no special loyalty to their workers," observes an article from the school's online business journal Knowledge@Wharton, titled "Workplace Loyalties Change, but the Value of Mentoring Doesn't."

In the piece, Wharton management professors assert mentoring programs can keep talented workers from jumping ship and are a vital part of corporate social networking.
"If you go back a generation ago, your immediate supervisor had responsibility to develop you; the mentor was your boss," says Peter Cappelli, a Wharton management professor and director of the school's Center for Human Resources.

"Bosses knew how to be mentors. They knew what employees needed to do and they knew how to give employees a chance to accomplish things. Mentors were assessed based on the number of subordinates who got promoted and how the subordinates moved along in their careers."

However, during the 1980s and 1990s, American corporations began to embrace outsourcing and organizational restructuring, which lead to a change of heart with mentoring programs.
"Companies told mentors, We're trying to get rid of people, so we can't promote your mentee,'" Capelli explains. "The idea became to find mentors who weren't necessarily someone you worked closely with or for. Instead of your supervisor, your mentor became somebody you could bounce ideas off of and get career advice from. It became more low-impact."

Nevertheless, 71% of Fortune 500 companies have a mentoring program, and academic research shows there are many benefits for both mentor and mentee, Wharton reports.

Case study

In 2006, Gartner, a Connecticut-based research firm, studied the effect of mentoring among employees at California-based technology firm Sun Microsystems. The research examined more than 1,000 workers over a five-year period, taking into account factors such as employee-salary grade, job-performance rating and merit increase in salary.

The study revealed, according to the Wharton article, that 25% of employees who enrolled in the company's mentoring program had a salary-grade change, while only 5% of workers who did not participate in the program had a change.

What's more, mentors were promoted six times more often than those not in the program, while mentees were promoted five time more often than non-enrollees. Retention rates also were higher for both mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) than for employees who did not participate in the mentoring program.

However, the Sun study did note that mentoring was least effective for the highest-performing employees. The observation surprised researchers, given that mentoring programs generally focus on high performers. In the end, the researchers concluded that "the better investment for Sun would be to spend the money on lower performers to help them raise their level of performance,"' the article notes.

Building relationships

Meanwhile, management scholars contend that younger workers must zero in on a mentor right way because their time at the company may not be that long. They have to quickly take advantage of the mentor-mentee relationship to ensure career advancement and receive sound career advice.

The Wharton management team, however, admits that it does not have all the answers to whether a 21st-century transient workforce will redefine corporate mentoring.

"If the employment contract is shorter and looser than before, if people do not stay in organizations for decades like they once did, what does that mean for people who need mentors?" ask Katherine Klein, a Wharton management professor.

"If you find a mentor in Company A, and you move to Company B, and the mentor moves to Company C, can you still get mentored by this person?" she adds. "Or are people having to rebuild mentoring relationships with greater frequency because everybody is moving around more than before? We don't know the answers to those questions yet."

Older workers who take on the mentor role can also improve their social capital within the organization. "Dealing with a person who is your junior improves your network," Klein explains. "Mentors know more about what goes on in lower levels when they deal with mentees. Junior people can provide information to mentors. They are up on the latest technology and knowledge. So it's an interactive process: Mentors and proteges become co-learners."

Klein further says employers should note that some women and minorities might find it difficult to reach out to a mentor. As a result, "senior management should tell all managers to Step out of your comfort zones and provide support and advice for a broad section of employees.' Statements like that, backed up by the most senior people, can make a big difference," she says.