MENTORING AS A TOOL FOR CAREER AND HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF THE UNIVERSITY FOR DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Abstract

Tertiary educational institutions are labour intensive and are largely dependent on their employees for efficient delivery of services in order to achieve their goals. Most organizations place much emphasis on mentoring programmes through their training and development efforts in order to enhance employee knowledge, skills and ability. The University for Development Studies (UDS) is the only public university in Ghana that was established without affiliation to any existing university, locally or abroad. Hence, from start the UDS as a public higher education institution has not had the benefit of going through mentoring. This situation has disadvantaged the institution in terms of the development of its human resource capacity. Further to this, within the institution itself, there do not appear to be any significant premium on mentoring. The aim of this research was to investigate how mentoring might be strengthened to facilitate and augment the University's quest to develop and maintain a high calibre of qualified human resource component . The descriptive survey design was used to collect data to answer this question through the use of questionnaire and key informant interview. A participant triangulation method was utilised to solicit information by conducting key informant interviews with Deans, Directors, Management personnel and young lecturers and Administrators. A total of 242 questionnaires were distributed to various categories of respondents of the study of which 200 responded, resulting in a considerable satisfactory response rate of 83% . The study revealed that a formal and informal mentoring on-one-one base is prevalent in all campuses of the University. It was also found out that the paucity of mentors, laxity of young employees to avail themselves for mentoring and disrespect for seniors were major challenges impeding mentoring in the institution. Drawing on the Marsick and Watkins' informal and incidental learning model and the Developmental Model of mentoring in higher education as framework for the analysis, it has been concluded that formal mentoring is not a panacea to solving the human resource challenges of the University. What might be useful is management's commitment to strengthen the existing system of informal mentoring which is in wide use and complement it with formal mentoring.