When I look back at my career I can differentiate between mentors, preceptors and nurses who helped orient me to a new unit or new job. One person in my career was, over a period of time all three. Mentoring activities include teaching, supporting, providing organizational intervention, and sponsoring.

On my pediatric unit, we mentor many types of student nurses. We have students from ADN, BSN, and LPN programs. We also have high school students, who spend a few hours daily with us over a period of time. In Pediatrics and PICU, we have students from Community and City Colleges with their instructors. We also have LPN students from Technical Colleges with their instructors. As staff nurses, we are noted asked to grad or evaluate these students but to offer them guidance. In this capacity we teach, support and sponsor the students. Organization intervention is also achieved as we can identify a student who we believe could become a future employee.

However, true mentoring goes beyond these examples. Mentoring should enrich all of us, as mentoring is a give and take phenomenon. As we are teaching a new nurse on the unit, we are ourselves learning from this relationship. For example, the new nurse may ask us a question to which we have no answer, but together we seek to find the answer. In the role of sponsoring the new nurse, we can take over where the formal orientation ended. We can invite the new nurse to outside the hospital social activities with fellow employee’s, encourage professional development, membership in local professional organizations and encourage specialty certification.

Mentoring should continue with all of the staff members. We all possess certain attributes which when blended together will make a sense of completeness. In other words, we are all better than one of us. Mentoring relationships have benefits fro the staff regardless of the length of the relationship or whether that relationship is formal or informal. Examples of informal mentoring include encouragement from one staff member to another to become certified, to join a professional organization, to attend a conference together and to work on the Clinical Practice Recognition together. Mentoring encourages a culture of working together rather than one of competition.