How to become an MPDS or SRS mentor
MPDS Mentor Training Requirements
The requirement for triennial training for mentors arose from concerns raised by both our Professional Development Standards Committee (who ratify MPDS schemes) and our Professional Review Committee (who ratify individual membership elections). Please do bear in mind that the concerns specified below arise from our experiences across all company schemes, and therefore do not necessarily specifically relate to your organisation.
These concerns fall into two categories:
- Mentors who appear to be over-scoring their mentees, and therefore putting candidates forward before they are really ready (in the view of the Professional Review assessors) and therefore have at both the individual mentor level, and the corporate level, an unacceptably high deferral rate.
- Mentors who are not as engaged and supportive of their mentees as they should be, particularly in terms of timeliness of feedback on reports. The purpose of the scheme is that Developing Engineers are given on-going advice and support and mentors should be keeping mentees reports up-to-date.
For these reasons, the new training requirement has been instituted. However, we do want to be sure that this does not become an administrative burden on companies and individual members, which is why as a Mentor, you can record any mentor training completed. To do this, you will need to:
- Log into your account
- On your Mentor Summary page, please scroll down to “Mentor training entries”
- Please click on “Add Training”
- This will then take you to a section where you can add details such as the type of mentor training completed and the training date.
Once submitted, this will update on your Mentor Summary page.
What will happen in practice is that before a re-accreditation visit, the panel members will review, along with other documentation, the training record of the mentors, together with the ‘outcome’ evidence – i.e. that the number of successful candidates being elected falls within the norm. If they should find for example, that within a company no or few mentors are registering their training activities, and that the deferral rate of candidates is higher than the norm, this would be raised as an issue to be addressed at the visit. However, with strong, mature schemes we would be very surprised if this is the case, so have suggested that the training requirement can be met in a number of ways, including clients’ own internal activities, or by a variety of briefings provided by the Institution's staff or volunteers. Whatever the activity undertaken, we simply need to know what it is before the next accreditation visit.
We would expect both the IMechE members mentoring a Developing Engineer linked to an alternative PEI, or an alternative PEI member mentoring an IMechE Developing Engineer, to comply with this requirement. It is simply to ensure the Developing Engineers are being given proper support as they work through towards registration such that they have the best opportunity to gain their registration status as possible at the appropriate time.
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