Career Advising (Mentoring)

Senior faculty are expected to make themselves available for scheduled meetings with their junior colleagues, and to review carefully any materials they have been provided in advance. They are expected to provide accurate information about disciplinary and University norms and practices, to provide constructive advice and feedback, and to refer their junior colleagues to others for information they may not have. They are expected to notify the chair or director of important unmet needs for information or advice that should be addressed. Senior faculty may find that the discussion of their role in the handbook Giving and Getting Career Advice provides additional detail that is useful.

The junior faculty member is expected to review the handbook Giving and Getting Career Advice created by the ADVANCE program  and, if necessary, to prepare an “agenda” or list of topics to discuss. The department/program is expected to initiate formal meetings. It is important for the junior faculty member to raise questions and issues with one or more of the career advisors as soon as they arise, and not to delay raising them. If the junior faculty member feels that the career advising structure is not working well for whatever reason, s/he should bring that fact to the attention of the chair or director, or his/her divisional associate dean. In some cases, an advisor from outside of the department may be a preferred option.

• Sponsoring a meeting at least once a year, announced well beforehand and with a follow-up reminder, and open to all tenure-track faculty, to discuss the requirements for tenure and promotion and the tenure and promotion process.  Chairs, directors, and mentors are invited to this meeting and are strongly encouraged to attend as one way to encourage transparency and dialogue in these proceedings.

• Meeting with groups of junior faculty from time to time to speak with them about particular issues.

• Asking all chairs and directors to include in their annual reports a section on career advising as it is provided to junior faculty with diverse characteristics; including discussion of this issue in the annual review conversation between the Dean and chairs and directors.

• Working with chairs and directors of departments and programs to help ensure a constructive work environment for those faculty.

• Making available to chairs and directors and to tenure-track faculty a list of resources available on campus to improve teaching, facilitate career advising, provide information about progress to tenure, etc.

• Sponsoring an information session annually on effective career advising for faculty members and for chairs and directors.

• Providing financial support for career advising activities departments design and propose. These may include tailored activities for individual faculty (e.g., invitations to campus for consultations with external scholars about important career issues; sponsorship of a book manuscript workshop; support for travel to meetings or campuses for consultation with particular experts in a subfield not included in the department; creation of department-wide structures for peer and/or zone advising.

The Chair or Director’s Role: It is the responsibility of departments and programs to provide a formal faculty career advising program. The establishment of a climate for advising/mentoring faculty is a particular responsibility of department chairs and program directors.  In addition, career advising should be provided to all tenure-track faculty in a meeting with their chair or director at least once a year; the focus of this conversation should be their research, teaching, and service activities that year, in relation to their progress toward tenure.  These conversations are separate from the formal career advising program and other informal mentoring that individual faculty may seek and obtain; they are not a substitute.  These discussions should be constructive and diagnostic, and should include information about the third-year review and tenure and promotion review processes.  Without predicting the likelihood of success at the end of the probationary period, chairs and directors should address areas of strength and areas for improvement in the faculty member’s teaching, research, and service and should provide suggestions about goals and strategies for improvement.   

Chairs and directors should review each junior faculty member’s work assignments carefully to ensure that they are not being unduly burdened by an excessive number of new course preparations, too many large classes, or demanding service assignments.  Tenure-track faculty should be given the opportunity to teach in the area(s) of their research at the senior undergraduate and graduate levels during their first five years.  Such opportunities may include team teaching.  Service assignments to tenure-track faculty should ideally serve as mentoring contexts in which the candidate learns about the values and operations of the University.  It is important to evaluate what tenure-track faculty are likely to learn from any given assignment (e.g., the curriculum committee vs. the social committee).

The chair or director should take seriously the fact that senior faculty are often uncertain about how best to provide advice and help to their more junior colleagues. Some Chairs have found it helpful to have a once a year meeting with the mentor and the junior faculty member together.    Faculty mentors/advisors in a department or program should be provided with resources to support their efforts. These might include presentation and discussion of CRLT Players’ sketch on Faculty Career Advising, and faculty discussions of common issues arising in the context of faculty career advising.

The College strongly recommends that every junior faculty member should receive a copy of the handbook Giving and Getting Career Advice created by the ADVANCE program.

The Departmental Career Advising Program:  Units must think carefully about the relationship between career advising and faculty evaluation. Junior faculty have reported, for example, that annual “mentoring” meetings with Executive Committees or Promotion and Merit Committees may not be effective because it is difficult to ask for help from committees that set salaries or judge fitness for promotion. At the same time, it is critical that the career advisors be represented in every formal evaluation process undertaken during the probationary period.  For that reason, it is recommended, whenever possible, that one career advisor be designated to participate in these processes, either as a consultant (e.g., to the chair about the career advisors’ view of the candidate’s progress) or as a participant (e.g., in third-year and tenure reviews at the unit level).  In this way, the candidate’s need for frank information and feedback can be protected, without removing all of those most knowledgeable about the candidate’s work from the evaluation processes.  In some cases a discipline may be too small to completely differentiate various senior roles.

Departments are expected to implement departmentally appropriate mentoring including one or more of the following types:

1. A committee of two or more tenured faculty members to constitute a career advising committee, which should meet as a group with the junior faculty member at least once each year; committee membership should be jointly decided by the chair or director and the junior faculty member.  This model is likely to work best in larger departments and/or interdisciplinary programs, but is recommended for all units.  One member of this committee should normally play some role in communicating information from the career advising committee to evaluators in the department or program (e.g., the chair/director, salary review committees, tenure and promotion and/or executive committees, etc.).

2. A senior faculty career advisor jointly selected by the junior faculty member and the department chair or program director; that individual, the department chair or program director, and the junior faculty member should meet together at least once each year as a group to discuss the junior faculty member’s progress, as well as a plan for mentorship for the next year.  This model is likely to become necessary in smaller departments and programs with limited personnel available for mentoring.  One important drawback of this model is that it makes it very difficult to separate career advising and evaluation.

3. A joint career advising committee, appointed during the first semester of the faculty member’s appointment by the chairs or directors of the joint-appointing units.  Whenever possible, this committee will have at least two faculty members (and may have more), representing the units equally.  It is often useful to begin by considering for membership one or more of the members of the search committee resulting in this appointment.  Faculty with joint appointments may represent multiple units, but will then have responsibility to report to more than one.  It is sometimes more straightforward for a faculty member to serve only as a representative of one unit.   The joint career advising committee is expected to meet with the untenured faculty member in person at least once each year, though it is often useful to meet once per semester.  The committee is expected to provide the usual kinds of advice to untenured faculty about the processes associated with publication, obtaining support for research, teaching, service, and navigating political and collegiality issues within the disciplines, units, and University.  Departments and programs may find it helpful to create a checklist to help committees remember to cover all topics at each meeting, including items unique to their field.  In any case, the committee is expected particularly to advise the faculty member on the process of review for tenure and promotion, and for third-year review.  Moreover, at least one member of this joint career advising committee should, whenever this is practical, serve on or advise both the third-year and the tenure review committees that eventually evaluate the untenured faculty member.   Finally, it is the special responsibility of career advising committees for jointly-appointed faculty to bring to the attention of the unit chairs or directors any issues about overload or inequity in teaching and service assignments, and to assist in working out solutions that keep the faculty member’s best interests at the center.

Initiating Career Advising for New Faculty:  As soon as a candidate accepts a position, the chair or director should begin to work with faculty colleagues to develop a career advising plan for the new faculty member.  Upon arrival on campus, the new faculty member should be consulted in developing this plan.  The plan should include attention to teaching, graduate supervision, and research, and should be predicated on being of assistance to the new faculty member.  The new faculty member should be consulted about the members of the committee and the advising plan.  This career advising plan should include participation by several members of the department or program during the years of the candidate’s progress toward tenure, as outlined in the models above and should include some provision for changing the senior faculty participants.  

Each fall, the Dean’s Office will ask each unit to provide a list of the names of the senior faculty involved in advising each new faculty member.

Career Advising/Mentoring Procedures for Faculty in Joint Appointments: In recognition that it is sometimes difficult for units to coordinate career advising arrangements for faculty with appointments in more than one unit, the Divisional Associate Deans in LSA will review the creation and maintenance of joint career advising committees for untenured faculty.  The membership of the committee will be reported to the LSA Dean’s Office, and the chair or director will ensure that it meets.  Associate Deans may meet with the junior faculty member to confirm that this occurs.

Because a small number of untenured faculty have dry appointments, and some of those eventually become budgeted, the procedures outlined here will apply to faculty with both budgeted and dry joint appointments.  These procedures, described in #3 above, are in addition to the procedures described for faculty with appointments in one unit.

It is the hope of the College of LSA that newly hired faculty will receive useful professional advice from their colleagues in the academic community. Career advising, sometimes called mentoring, can take many forms: it may be formal and deliberate or informal and unintentional; it may take place in a group or one-on-one. It includes advice about the substance of teaching and research in the academy, about navigating the academic environment, about work-life balance, and about external measures of success, such as where one publishes. Career advising is an activity that sometimes occurs between and among peers, as well as between and among those with different levels of experience. In an academic community, mentoring is ideally freely sought and freely given among colleagues with different needs for assistance at different career stages. Please see the Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty page and your departmental career advising/mentoring policy for more information.

The College of LSA will provide up to a total of $3500 to each department that appoints a new Assistant Professor. These funds are to be used for career advising/mentoring activities over the course of the Assistant Professor’s time at this rank. These activities are identified by the Assistant Professor, with input from the department chair and mentoring committee. Each Assistant Professor will have full discretion on how the entire $3500 will be spent, as long as the activities are on career advising/mentoring.

Assistant Professors who wish to request the funds should prepare a brief proposal describing a plan, a budget, and a timeline for key activities. Before developing a proposal, Assistant Professors should consult with their chair and their mentors regarding both the typical and required mentoring activities in the department. Some examples of appropriate expenses include:

• Costs associated with a manuscript workshop (for Assistant Professors in book fields).

• Costs associated with coaching services and professional workshops to improve productivity and/or time management skills.

• Honoraria to bring relevant scholars to campus for career advising/mentoring activities, such as a book workshop, a working forum, or a panel to review the Assistant Professor’s research/grant proposals.

• Food for formal mentoring meetings over lunch or dinner between the Assistant Professor and other faculty. These can be organized around a particular subject or issue, e.g., research interests, effective teaching, tenure prep, work-life balance, writing projects, etc., and can be with a peer group or with one or more senior mentors. At most, up to 20% of funds may be spent on meals.

Note: These funds are not meant to support research activities ordinarily funded by faculty discretionary research funds or the department (e.g., conference travel, research equipment, editors, departmental seminars, faculty meetings, etc.)

The College recognizes that career advising/mentoring plans are likely to evolve through the probationary period and funds may not be spent precisely as originally planned. The Dean’s office should be consulted for approval if there are significant variations from the original budget. After approval by the unit Chair/Director, the proposal should be submitted to the unit's business analyst who will then route it to the Divisional Associate Dean for final approval. Approved requests will be forwarded back to the Budget and Finance Team and the unit will be notified. A Project Grant will be created and funded for the entire approved amount. Once tenure is achieved, any remaining funds will be rescinded.