PERCEPTIONS OF ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS IN GHANA ON THE ROLE OF MENTORING IN KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER FOR CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Mentoring, besides being said to have a positive effect on one‘s career has been proven to have enormous benefits not only to individuals but to organizations as well. It has made enormous contributions to retention and recruitment of talent, to succession planning, knowledge management and transfer, stress reduction, and eventually to increased production. This study attempts to investigate the perceptions of academic librarians in Ghana‘s universities about mentoring; and also to investigate the perceptions of academic librarians on knowledge transfer through mentoring for skill development. The survey design made use of a questionnaire to collect data from librarians in state-owned academic libraries in Ghana. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for the analyses of the results. Findings from the study indicate that mentoring was perceived by respondents as capable of fostering and aiding the acquisition of diverse professional skills and thus capable of ultimately having a positive impact on the career development of academic librarians in Ghana.