What is the Impact of Having a Mentor and Who is More Likely to Have Access to One?
There’s a lot of talk about the advantages of having a mentor, but what is the true impact on career advancement? The McCarthy Mentoring group puts it in numbers. According to a five-year study of 1000 employees,
25% of those who enrolled in a mentoring program had a salary grade change, compared to only 5% of workers who did not participate. Mentees are promoted five times more often than those not in a mentoring program, and retention rates were higher for both mentees (22% more) and mentors (20% more) than for employees who did not participate in a mentoring program.
I was recently in a meeting with a career development expert, the one statement that helped me visualize the impact of not having a mentor was when she compared having a person with access to a mentor and a person without one. If each of them had $10 in their pocket, the former would know how to invest that money for the long run with the help of mentors and guidance, while the latter would keep those $10 not knowing what to do next. By the laws of compound interest, in the long run, the difference between a hockey stick and a linear or flat line is almost an eye soar.
This begs the question, who is more likely to have access to a mentor and who is not? One must first look at levels of education, professional advancement, and how these levels compare. For example, in the US, people in minority groups are more likely to be first-generation college graduates in recent history. According to the National Center of Education Statistics,
The percentage who had completed a bachelor’s or higher degree was higher in 2016 than 2010 for adults who were White (35 and 31 percent, respectively), Black (21 and 18 percent, respectively), Hispanic (15 and 13 percent, respectively), Asian (54 and 50 percent, respectively), Pacific Islander (18 and 15 percent, respectively), and of Two or more races (34 and 29 percent, respectively).
According to the Pullias Center for Higher Education of the University of Southern California, access to mentors makes a significant difference between applying for college and not. Additionally, higher levels of education mean more access to a well-educated network. With this in mind, one might conclude that people without a high level of education have less access to mentors as their peers simply because they have outgrown the skillsets and business savvy of their family and social circle.
The fact remains that individuals who don’t have a mentor (irrespective of their background), have to put in extra work to overcome knowledge and networking gaps. Something that puts them a few rungs below on the ladder vs their peers. In a professional environment, this can also feed into imposter syndrome. Their peers (though fighting some degree of imposter syndrome of their own) show skills these individuals may find intimidating: speaking up in meetings, having a healthy network, knowing how to network, offering succinct feedback and having an opinion, etc. In the long run, these soft and key skills translate into faster promotion cycles and bigger, more impactful opportunities.
To fix this issue, it is not enough for these individuals to figure things out on their own. That “sink or swim” approach is not scalable and it is short-sighted — it is a loss not only for the individual but also a loss at a macroeconomic level. The bigger the number of individuals with strong economic power, the more powerful the company, the city, the state, and the country become.
With this in mind, the career development expert mentioned a key element to overcome this mentoring gap: fix it at a systemic level. Of course, it is way easier said than done. This solution will require years of work at micro and macro levels, years of making people aware of this issue, privileged and minority groups alike; giving them all the right tools to build a sustainable way to give folks access to a mentor, and at the same time, changing their mindset and tapping into unconscious bias. This is multi-generational work and of course beyond the scope of this article and my expertise.
However paramount and overwhelming this challenge is, this declaration made me realize that the solution for this is truly team-work.
