The Career Benefits of Mentorship

Starting your career fresh out of school can be overwhelming. We all have questions from time to time that weren’t necessarily covered in classes. Your education prepared you well, but people can stumble through their first few years without some guidance. You need a mentor in your field that understands exactly what you’re going through.

Mentoring is usually defined as a relationship between an experienced and a less experienced person. In this partnership, the mentor provides guidance, advice, support, and feedback to the mentee. Some companies use mentorships as part of a leadership development program or a way to increase collaboration. Overall, it is a valuable relationship that brings out the best in mentees and mentors.

For healthcare professionals, this relationship can be invaluable. Participating in a mentor program can be a positive experience for all involved. Both the mentor and mentee benefit and develop professionally. In fact, a mentor who has advanced clinical skills and years of experience as a therapist can even learn from their mentee.

The Importance of Mentors

The goal of a mentorship program is to foster relationships, behaviors, and activities that embody the organizations core principles. Mentoring can also help facilitate risk awareness to result in fewer errors and decrease liability exposure.

Mentoring is important, not only because of the knowledge and skills students can learn from mentors, but also because mentors can see where we need to improve when we often cannot. As dedicated individuals, mentors are constantly promoting and enhancing the development of their profession through teaching and passing on clinical reasoning.

Who Qualifies as a Mentor?

Most mentorship programs have a list of qualifications each mentor must reach before finding their mentee. These qualifications change from discipline to discipline but many have similar guidelines. For example, mentors for speech-language pathologist clinical fellows must adhere to American Speech-Language and Herring Association (ASHA) and state guidelines for mentoring CFs. Other qualifications include:

  • Active professional certification for the discipline
  • Active state license for the discipline if required by that state
  • Willing to meet responsibilities and requirements for serving as a mentor
  • A minimum of 3 years working in their discipline withing the past 5 years
  • Deep knowledge about best practices and guidelines for mentoring required by the profession and/or state

Who Qualifies as a Mentee?

The qualifications for a mentee tend to be a bit less stringent. Allied healthcare professional mentorship programs are typically built for recent graduates from accredited universities. The mentoring programs are created to provide structured, systematic clinical support and career development programs for speech-language pathologists, SLP clinical fellows, occupational therapists, school psychologists and physical therapists.

Our BUILD Mentorship Program

BUILD Your Future is Supplemental Health Care’s unique mentoring program. It helps clinicians independently chart their career journey, prepare to experience success, and overcome challenges and roadblocks. Our program inspires many to pursue specialized aspect of their discipline while acquiring knowledge and skills.

  • Best practices
  • Unique opportunities
  • Inspirational guidance from experts
  • Lasting relationships
  • Dynamic experiences

BUILD provides structured, systematic clinical support and career development while offering the foundation for a strong career start. BUILD provides solutions, tools and resources for managing caseloads, workloads and helps you establish a professional network.

Our Approach

SHC takes a personalized approach with all of our mentorship relationships. Mentors are matched based on personality, location, learning needs and more. We help schedule the initial connection between mentor and mentee to determine communication expectation, times to meet, etc. If necessary, we introduce the mentor to appropriate district personnel and assist in coordinating the relationship between mentee, district, and mentor.

An SHC mentor will help identify future career directions and professional development opportunities with you. Start your career off on the right path. If you are ready to BUILD your Future, contact SHC today! For questions for our Schools Center of Excellence team, please email SchoolSolutions@shccares.com.