Lifetime Learning

MENTORING MAKES ITS MARK

Dr Judie Gannon is the programme co-ordinator for the Bacchus Mentoring programme in the Department of Hospitality Leisure and Tourism Management at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. In October 2010, the programme entered its third year. In this article for Leader, Dr Gannon explains how it all started, and reveals how the much-lauded programme helps final year undergraduates ease into their future careers.

I’m delighted that the Bacchus Mentoring Scheme in 2010 has grown to include ninety-six mentors. The Lancaster London was the perfect setting for the 2010 launch and provided wonderful surroundings for bringing mentors, all senior figures from the international hospitality and tourism industry, and their mentees together for the first time.

I’ve been an academic in this area for over ten years now and am a fervent believer in the value industry exposure offers students and faculty. In the hospitality sector, we have seen graduates really start to make their mark as technology, revenue management and leadership developments require managers to move up a gear to derive the kind of results business demands.

Insight and passion

During my doctoral studies on the management of general managers, I was struck by the number of times mentoring was mentioned as critical to managers’ career success. The Bacchus Mentoring Scheme emerged from this insight and two important concepts staff and alumni from the Department passionately believe in: graduate employability and employer engagement.

In the early part of 2008, with the help of the Bacchus Alumni committee, I set up a small team, harnessing expertise from across the University and began to design a scheme to run from September 2008. The specific objectives of the scheme were:

• To enhance student employability through greater engagement with leading industry participants
• To facilitate smoother higher education to work transitions and improved reflective learning amongst students through guided interactions with their mentors
• To build stronger relationships between the Department, School and University with Alumni and the wider hospitality and tourism industry
• To provide realistic insights into the challenges and opportunities for building successful careers within the hospitality and tourism industry
• To provide networking opportunities for participating Alumni and greater engagement with the programmes and activities of the Department, School and wider University

Alumni to the fore

What we really wanted to do was to create a more definitive opportunity for our alumni to engage with our programmes of study and develop a stronger community of practice between faculty, students, alumni and industry. Our Bacchus Alumni society and network of placement and careers employers were critical in the programme’s development, identifying possible mentors and providing excellent insights and ideas.

As always, our Bacchus Alumni committee were fantastic with Tim West of Lexington, Peter Chapman of The Chefs Net and Lou Willcock of IndiCater providing fantastic support alongside the excellent connections we already had with our placement and careers employers.

Our first year -- the academic year 2008/9 -- ran with a modest forty-five mentor volunteers. Now I have an extensive waiting list of eager mentors for the programme -- a real testament to the impression it has made on the industry and the passion industry leaders have for developing the next generation of managers. We have also been nominated for various awards including the Springboard Awards for Excellence, Training Journal awards and the Hotcat Innovation award.

Engaging students

We decided to use a final year module, led by my colleague Angela Maher, to engage students in the mentoring programme. Each of the one hundred students on the module is asked to undertake an analysis of suitable employment organisations, which extends their knowledge of the industry and builds on modules already studied on the programme.

Training is identified as critical to the success of mentoring relationships and we developed and sourced interventions and support materials so that our mentors and mentees could make the most of their relationships. At the 2010 Lancaster launch event, Derek Osborn from Whatnext4U and Nick Booth from LeadingEdge took the mentors through their paces, covering topics including the nature and boundaries of mentoring, effective mentoring skills and handling difficult conversations.

Keeping open channels

We suggest mentors and mentees are in contact once a month between October and April of the academic year as the students work towards completing the final stages of their undergraduate degrees. The main method of contact is telephone, Skype or email (though face to face meetings are encouraged where possible). Mentors also give feedback on CVs and career plans, provide interview practice, organise workplace visits for their mentees and attend networking events with them.

Students’ experiences of attending their mentor’s workplaces or professional events, and engaging in discussions with clients, suppliers, staff and their wider networks, was seen to have a transformative effect. We also realised pretty quickly that mentors find the networking opportunities between themselves a very valuable addition to the programme and subsequent events have meant we specifically timetable this in.

All worthwhile

The scheme does require a huge amount of co-ordination and hard work but the feedback from participants helps sustain our enthusiasm and commitment. I recently received an email from a graduate who was on last year’s scheme. It said, ‘To me the Bacchus mentoring programme has been of great benefit. I hope that it continues and provides students with the experience that I have gained through the scheme.’ You really cannot beat that kind of feedback.

The commitment of Andrew Batchelor, manager of The Lancaster and an alumnus of Oxford Brookes, reflects a widespread recognition in the hospitality sector of this as a ground-breaking initiative. We were so pleased when he said, ‘We believe that the Bacchus programme is invaluable in helping students build bridges from the protected environment of higher education into what is often perceived as a hostile workplace environment. Hosting this year's launch cements our extremely meaningful relationship with Oxford Brookes and helps us form links with young talent and future leaders.’

Reviewing and sharing

We do have structured ways of gaining feedback from the mentors and mentees too and have devised an online questionnaire to review their engagement with the programme. The feedback from the participants in the first two years has been tremendously valuable and the results were presented to a Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development forum (CIPD) on graduate development as well as at other industry events.

Finally, Donald Sloan, Head of the Department, expressed what all of us involved in the programme must truly feel. He said, ‘I am proud of the work the team, students and industry leaders have put in to making this programme a success. This is a unique opportunity for our students to innovatively engage with senior alumni and colleagues as they build upon their undergraduate studies and develop their careers in the industry.’

To find out more about the Bacchus Mentoring Scheme at Oxford Brookes University, contact Dr Judie Gannon at jmgannon@brookes.ac.uk. To find out more about studying at Oxford Brookes University’s Department of Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism Management, visit http://www.business.brookes.ac.uk .