A key part of SCI’s strategic mission is to support members’ careers through training, development and employment opportunities. To facilitate this mission SCI has launched a new Member Benefit - The SCI Mentoring Programme.*
Playing to SCI’s unique strength as a multidisciplinary and all-inclusive Society; partnerships made through the scheme will demonstrate SCI’s broad membership and will be both multi-industry and multi-science in nature. They will enable connections to be made over common topics. The Programme will also offer a platform for participants (both Mentors and Mentees) to make themselves known to the SCI community, opening up other channels of communication and enhancing networking skills.
In September, we let you know that the SCI Mentoring Matching Panel had met to discuss initial mentor/mentee pairings and we were about to confirm the first partnerships to the participants. We are now pleased to let you know that the first two matches have been confirmed.
Through their participation in the SCI Mentoring Programme we have found that mentees are seeking assistance in common topics. These include; networking and communication, problem solving and decision making, transitioning from academia into industry and general career development. Our mentors come from a range of scientific backgrounds and industries. Some have worked for major corporations, others for scientific spin-out companies, as consultants, or in academia. Mentors have been matched to mentees based on the skills, knowledge and area(s) of expertise which they can offer and we are looking forward to monitoring the progress of these partnerships.
On 20 October we held a further training session for mentors and following this we hope to able to confirm some more matches. In the New Year we will be holding some more training sessions for mentors and mentees so please keep an eye out for further details in future updates.
*The SCI Mentoring Programme is currently operating under a pilot scheme and is by invitation only. If you are interested in taking part once the full programme is in operation, please email mentoring@soci.org.
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