Mentoring has a long history. The word ‘mentor’ comes from Greek mythology, when Ulysses entrusted his son’s education to his old friend, Mentor. This is described in The Odyssey, an epic Greek poem dating back at least 3,000 years. The term ‘mentor’ thus became associated with the idea of a more experienced person acting as a guide to a younger and/or less experienced person.
Mentoring disappeared for a significant period before becoming increasingly popular over the last two decades of the twentieth century, particularly in English speaking countries. Levinson’s (1978) longitudinal research in the 1970s into male development stimulated an interest in mentoring in the United States. He used the term ’mentor’ for someone who was half a generation older who could accelerate the development of another through age-related transitions. This quickly became the catalyst for rapid growth in mentoring in the United States that focused on rapid career progression.
It is from this point that we start to see the emergence of a body of literature about mentoring in American business management (Colley, 2002). Influential articles (particularly Roche’s report, Much Ado about Mentoring (1979)), claimed to have discovered mentoring as an informal but important part of a business man’s career. Mentoring in Britain then began to be seen as an American import, which had to be adapted to British culture. Clutterbuck was instrumental in the 1980s in bringing the idea of mentoring to Britain from the United States. He is regarded as the ‘grandfather’ of mentoring.
Mentoring has now become a key feature of initial training in public service professions, including nursing, teaching and business management. It has also been used to foster social inclusion, with mentors working with disadvantaged young people. Colley argues that, given mentoring’s rise in popularity, it might be expected that the recent past would have produced clear theoretical and practical frameworks for its implementation. However, this has not been the case. Despite first appearing in academic literature in the 1970s, the concept remains elusive, with relatively slight coverage in formal journals (Piper and Piper, 2000).