A new study has indicated that young people who have had mentors are likelier to succeed in their careers.
The study conducted by North Carolina State University observed that people mentors ultimately put people on a path to more financially and personally rewarding careers.
Dr. Steve McDonald, an associate professor of sociology at NC State, said that they wanted to look at the long-term impacts on mentees in naturally occurring mentorship relationships, rather than participants in formal mentorship programs and they found that having a mentor provided a clear benefit well into their working lives.
The researchers evaluated data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, and approached more than 12,000 people in their teens and early 20s if they had ever had a mentor. Six years later, those young people were surveyed again and asked about their work but the researchers did more than just compare numbers from the survey.
Joshua Lambert, co-author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State, said that people who had mentors when they were younger had greater ‘intrinsic’ job rewards and they found that overall employment and compensation were about the same.
The study is published in American Journal of Community Psychology, 2014. (ANI)