Do you have a mentor at work? Unless you're the CEO, you should probably have one. That seems to be what a majority of chief financial officers believe, according to a recent survey from Accountemps, a division of staffing consulting firm Robert Half.
In a poll of 2,200 CFOs in 20 of the largest U.S. metro areas, 42 percent said it was "very important" for employees to have a mentor for career development. An additional 44 percent said it was somewhat important.
Only 8 percent said it was "not too important" for employees to have a mentor and only 5 percent said it was not important at all.
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Nearly half (48 percent) of the respondents said that the chief benefit of having a mentor is the rather broad notion that employees "can learn firsthand from someone in a role you aspire to."
But other CFOs were clearly more political in their reasoning. Twenty percent said the principle advantage is that a mentor can teach you the "unwritten rules" of the company, 11 percent said a mentor can provide a "neutral sounding board" for your ideas, 9 percent said a more senior employee can help a junior worker navigate office politics and 8 percent said a mentor can introduce you to new contacts.
But despite all of these stated advantages, only 26 percent of workers reported having a mentor in another poll Accountemps conducted of 1,000 U.S. employees.
The poll revealed a large gender disparity, with 33 percent of male workers having a mentor, compared to only 18 percent of female employees. Unsurprisingly, younger workers were more likely to report having a mentor; 41 percent of those under age 34 said they had one, compared to 17 percent for those aged 35-54 and 15 percent of those over 55.
Bill Driscoll, district president of Accountemps, told BenefitsPro that mentorships come in many different forms.
"Larger companies might have the resources to have a formal program, whereas smaller companies it could be more informal or just something that organically develops between people," he said.
Asked which method he favored, he said, "I think that having a formal mentor program as an extension of your training program is an excellent way to go."
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