Mentoring and Training
Mentoring and Training is a programme of the Conference of Equal Opportunities Commissioners at Universities in Baden-Württemberg (LaKoG), supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts.
The programme focuses on habilitating women and young women academics on their way to professorship. It is designed to encourage them to exert their competences and capitalise their chances, and acquire additional qualifications in such fields as personnel leadership and project management.
The mentoring part of the programme aims to help the participants to develop and define systematically their career profile, build up network platforms and informal contacts, crucial factors to a successful career. The participants can share the knowledge and experience of their mentors, they get attention and encouragement.
Fortunately, finding mentors, women and men, is not a problem.
Furthermore, the MuT Programme provides trainings and personal counselling in such fields as didactics, (self-) presentation and demeanour, career planning and application procedures.
The MuT Programme started in September 1998 with a group of women academics habilitating at universities of Baden-Württemberg (chosen out of 88 interested women). The participants made use of three days to expand their knowledge of social, structural and organizational conditions at universities, getting a background that their male colleagues in permanent positions were naturally learning by doing.
An important element of the programme was to analyze the own scientific career progression, a base to develop ideas and goals to work on with the mentor.
Being asked about their expectations the participants wanted to get a better assessment of their chances to get to know women in similar situations, to improve on didactics and rhetoric, to learn more on personal leadership, to overcome one’s isolation and to get guidelines on the way to professorship. After this first three days the echo was consistently very positive. And all participants wanted to continue to use the programme.
In the meantime, we are pleased to report that the first experiences of the cooperation of mentors and mentees are very positive and motivating to continue the programme.
