A Leg Up – Mentor Support For New Entrants to the Red Meat RD&A Profession

Summary

The A Leg Up program was designed to provide mentor support for new entrants into the red meat research, development and adoption (RD&A) workforce by pairing them with experienced industry professionals.

This project focused on facilitating effective communication, enabling skill transfer and building professional networks to assist RD&A entrants to set and achieve career goals.

Many entrants stated they were able to meet and exceed their personal goals through the mentoring program. During the project, several professional relationships were created between industry entrants and their mentors, which will progress beyond the program.

Objectives

A Leg Up is a framework to provide support for new entrants into all sectors of the Australian sheep and beef industries. The core objectives of the program are to:

• fill the gap of low employee retention rates in RD&A workforces
• provide a structured program to engage and support young and new workplace entrants
• foster, manage and ensure a professional network between established industry participants and new entrants.

Key findings

• Face-to-face meetings between new entrants and established professionals was a key factor to the success of mentoring relationships.
• The majority of respondents maintained the full contact agreement in their partnership (a monthly arrangement), by phone or Skype with a few face-to-face meetings.
• The main reason that mentoring agreements were not fulfilled was failure to make time. Results of the survey suggest this failure was mainly on the part of the new entrants.
• More than half (62.5%) of the new entrants have made positive changes to their professional life and 75% have made changes to their personal life as a result of mentoring.

Benefits to industry

The benefits of this program to sheep and beef producers include:

• maintaining industry's RD&A capacity by providing a succession plan
• increasing the transfer of knowledge and experience between generations of scientists, producers, consultants and extension services
• creating a culture of open communication and collaboration in the industry.

MLA action

The work carried out in this project was used to scope the Future Livestock Consultants program, which aims to address the significant decline in public extension and farm advisory services available to the red meat industry and develop the capability of subject matter expert consultants to fill the gap in service provision. The program will develop the capability of an additional 10 co-funded interns to deliver red meat industry extension programs and skilled one-on-one advice to broad-acre livestock producers.

Further, the learning from this 'A Leg Up' project is being used during the review of the MLA scholarships program, with a view to improving mentor support for PhD students.

Future research

On-going training in mentoring should be provided to industry leaders and influencers, to build a network of individuals who are equipped to assist each other. This could occur through formal mentoring programs, organic workplace environments or industry events/projects.

Future focus in this area should be on:

• funding mentoring programs
• identifying and recommending individuals for mentoring opportunities
• prioritising opportunities for those who have undertaken mentoring activity with MLA events, speaking engagement and/or RD&E projects.