Mentoring programmes: a study of the Spanish software industry

Mentoring is a very important tool for the development of human capital in Information Technology (IT) organisations. In such organisational environments, professional practice must be continually revised and improved in order to adapt workers competences' to technical innovations. As a result of these circumstances, mentoring practices are widely accepted in these particular types of organisations and several maturity frameworks in the IT field (such as People-Capability Maturity Model (People-CMM)) recommend mentoring as a practice to develop and retain IT personnel. Due to the ever-growing importance of mentoring processes in technology firms, in this work we point out the best way to design and apply mentoring programmes in three multinational companies devoted to technological consulting. Our main goal is to compare and provide an accurate benchmarking of the application of mentoring programmes in these three companies, with the recommendations provided by reference frameworks such as People-CMM. The outcome shows that there is a potentially large discrepancy between the practical application of mentoring programmes in the selected multinational companies and the relevant theoretical recommendations of People-CMM guidelines.

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