Faculty mentoring in higher education: results from a pilot program at Jammu, India

ABSTRACT Mentoring and coaching are established best practices across the corporate world. These are designed to support leadership development, career progression and engaging select employees with a view to enhancing performance and achievement at the individual, group and organization level. However, such practices have not found wide adoption across the higher education sector, especially in developing countries such as India where it is still an alien concept. We present early results from a year-long mentoring program for 12 faculty members at a higher education institution in Jammu, India. Mentoring was found to have the best outcomes for early and mid-career faculty especially women and resulted in attainment of significant individual and institutional outcomes. This paper makes a strong case for the wide-adoption of faculty mentoring across higher education institutions in India subject to some caveats.