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Exploring career mentoring and coaching
Exploring career mentoring and coaching

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Week 1: Where am I starting from?

Introduction

Welcome to Week 1 of this free badged course, Exploring career mentoring and coaching. Congratulations! Choosing to understand more about these activities and the impact they can have could really make a difference to your career.

Mentoring and coaching are undertaken in many different settings, but this course will focus on their use in the context of your work and career. It aims to give you a broad introduction to relevant theory and research, combined with practical advice and a range of activities. The intention is for this course to be useful whether you wish to have a mentor or coach yourself, or to enhance your own mentoring and coaching skills.

The terms mentor and mentee are used throughout this course to describe the two individuals involved in a mentoring relationship. In other sources, you might see a mentee described as a protégé, mentoree or client.

Throughout this course, the person on the receiving end of the coaching may be referred to as the coachee or client. There is a growing view that coachee, although still a widely used term, might soon become outdated as it implies that the client is passive in the coaching process. As you progress through the course, and through your experience of coaching, you can decide for yourself which terminology you prefer.

If you want to cover any of the topics discussed in greater depth, references are given to support further reading, and there are other OpenLearn courses [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] available.

The purpose of this first week is to introduce you to what mentoring and coaching are, and to allow you to reflect on how you might already have encountered mentors and coaches in your career. This will give you a firm starting point for your learning over the coming weeks.

Watch the following video which introduces this week.

Download this video clip.Video player: mc_1_week_1_intro.mp4
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By the end of this week, you will be able to:

  • recognise definitions of mentoring and coaching
  • describe the differences and similarities between mentoring and coaching
  • review and reflect on any mentoring and/or coaching you have experienced.