MENTORING IN THE CAREER DEVELOPMENT OF ILLINOIS COMMUNITY COLLEGE PRESIDENTS.

Abstract

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210 p.

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to determine the influence of mentors on the career development of Illinois community college presidents, and the extent those presidents were now mentoring others. Using a constant comparative method of data analysis the material obtained through 20 in-depth personal interviews was analyzed.The sample consisted of 20 male Illinois community college presidents selected through a stratified random sampling process.Data collected through these in-depth interviews led to findings conceptualized into four categories. The first category, mentoring characteristics, discusses that all presidents had multiple mentors; that mentors could be other persons or take inanimate forms such as books and institutions; and that the mentors functioned as teachers, facilitators, modelers, and encouragers.The second category, mentoring cycle, consists of initiation, duration, and termination periods, and a post-presidency phase where due to an interaction of position and age a president no longer had mentors.The third category, mentoring impact, discusses the tangible and intangible learnings which affected the president's career development. An analysis of presidents as mentors comprised the fourth and final category. The extent of mentoring that these presidents are engaged in bodes well for future leadership in higher education.Several of the findings are congruent with the previous research on mentoring, while the presence of an inanimate mentor, the uniqueness of the first mentor, and positive learning through negative mentors, in addition to the post-presidency findings, emerged as new insights obtained from this study.From these findings seven conclusions were drawn about the importance and nature of mentoring with regard to career development. Implications and recommendations were made which related to adult career development theory, higher education, and adult education. Areas for future research are also recommended.