The Effects of a Business Executive Mentoring Program on College Students: A Study on Augmenting Workforce Readiness Capacity

Abstract

Workforce readiness in college students occurs when graduates have core basic knowledge and the ability to apply their skills in the workplace. Business executives place a high value on the applied skills — sometimes referred to as soft skills — of professionalism, communication, leadership, critical thinking, and self-confidence. Workforce readiness and job success depend on a combination of social, personal, and applied cognitive skills. The literature identifies ways in which augmenting these skills can be accomplished, and mentoring could be an effective mechanism. Theoretically grounded empirical research is needed to both expand our understanding of workforce readiness and to inform effective mentoring. The context of our investigation is a mentoring program at a college of business. We examine the workforce readiness of students who participated in a mentoring program, drawing on mentoring theory. We gathered survey data over two years from a college of business and analyzed the resulting dataset through Partial Least Squares. The results reveal that mentoring makes a difference in increasing the workforce readiness of students. This study provides directions for researchers and implications for how business executives should mentor students for greater workplace effectiveness. The study has theoretical implications in showing that a theory of mentoring can very possibly be extended to students in a college of business.