EQUALITY GUIdE - KU Leuven

270 Equality Guide
fame of mentoring as a development and career supporting tool. But not all mentoring
relationships are equally effective and there is a variety of mentoring programmes and
a variety of goals. So what is considered to be effective depends on the goals set.
The goal of the mentoring course in this project has been to develop a mentoring instrument
within the university. The questions at the start have been: does it work in an
academic setting? What are the critical keys to success, conditions and limits?
The focus of this mentoring course was not on research, but on the effectiveness of the
methodology. There were no practices concerning formal one-on-one mentoring in a
Flemish university which we could study. An ‘orientation to mentoring and creating
support’ was yet to be created.
This happened by developing a mentoring programme that was continuously being
applied and evaluated in two pilot programmes: one at UHasselt and one at the
K.U.Leuven. The experiences from the pilots have been relatively positive.
Positive, because:
! mentoring can be implemented into a university in a relatively short period of time
at relatively low costs;
! the people involved highly valued mentoring as an instrument for career support for
young scientists.
Relatively, because:
! the number of people involved in these pilot programmes was small and the formal
project period was short;
! mentoring is not something that happens between two people just like that, on the
contrary, successful mentoring needs fine-tuning between the different actors (mentors,
mentees and coordinators) and the organization.
5.1. Transferability to other organizations and settings
Clarity about the purpose of the programme (why is it being done, what is expected of
the participants, what are the respective roles and responsibilities of mentor and mentee
and what are the desired outcomes) is the framework within which successful
mentoring relationships can grow. By means of concepts, descriptive cases and checklists
we offer a manual to adjust this fine-tuning to the organization. This was primarily
developed within and tailor-made to a university environment but is aimed at providing
basic principles that can be applied to all kinds of organizations. Hopefully, there
will be a possibility of verifying this general applicability. However, within the university
this VLIR-EQUAL project is just a first step, which could be a chance to further knowledge
development and longitudinal study to measure the impact of mentoring on the
distant goal: career support for target groups.