FLEET provides mentoring to personnel across all career stages, covering areas such as induction, career advancement and planning, equity and diversity, professional development, entrepreneurship and research leadership skills.
Three mentoring models are offered:
- Participation in Centre governance committees
- Group mentoring via training sessions, for example, on manuscript preparation, grant writing, scientific presentation and research leadership
- Individual, goal-oriented mentoring, where members are individually matched to a mentor within FLEET (or in some cases external to FLEET) based on their needs. For example, guiding applications for promotion, grant writing, or providing career advice.
Since the program launch at the end of 2017, over 80 mentorship pairs have been formed. The new Mentorloop platform introduced in 2021 (see below) has ‘reset’ the statistics on mentor program participation with 37 active mentorship pairs, and provides a benchmark against which future progress can be measured.
Currently, 32% of students, 55% of research fellows, 67% of associate investigators and 65% of chief investigators are participating as either mentors or mentees in the FLEET mentoring program.
Four tailored, individual mentoring programs are available:
- For early-career researchers exploring career options
- In industry, for researchers considering work outside academia
- In academia, for those researchers looking at on building their academic careers
- For Women in FLEET, focusing on challenges unique to women in STEM.
In addition to the above models, FLEET also leverages external mentoring programs to offer enhanced opportunities for its members, for example, winning scholarships from Women and Leadership Australia (WLA) for 11 members to advance their leadership skills in WLA’s flagship program, Leading Edge.
Based on feedback from the Centre-wide survey of our members , FLEET has reviewed its mentoring strategy, with member feedback driving significant improvements to the program. In particular, both mentors and mentees requested more guidance or training.
FLEET has begun expanding the current mentor network to include international partners and industry representatives, and alumni with diverse career experiences, including four new industry mentors working in areas ranging from research and business to entrepreneurship.
We have begun to add new mentors external to FLEET, with the first four working in a range of university environments including business and research administration, and research. Other new mentors are senior researchers at international research institutions, including three from FLEET partner organisations.
FLEET has employed the mentoring management platform Mentorloop to facilitate existing mentoring programs, providing improved capacity to match mentor to mentee, and provide evaluation tools measuring the effectiveness of the Centre mentoring program. The platform also delivers training resources for both mentor and mentee to enhance engagement, added in response to member feedback.
Since its roll-out in September 2021, 87 FLEET members (38% of membership) have signed up to the Mentorloop program.