30 Years of Modern Mentoring

Zusammenfassung

Mentoring has a much longer history than coaching, although it can be argued that both have their roots in Ancient Greece. But formal application of mentoring and research into mentoring emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first serious books on mentoring both appeared—in the same month, on two sides of the Atlantic—in mid-1985. This was no coincidence. My interest in mentoring had been inspired by a (then) young US academic, Kathy Kram, who had conducted her Ph.D. research into a sample of 28 informal mentoring relationships in North America. By the time she turned her dissertation into a book for wider audiences, I too had researched both formal and informal mentoring in a European context. We have been friends and collaborators ever since our first meeting in 1982.