Relational Mentoring in the Aviation and Aerospace Industry: Meeting Women’s Needs Through the Alta Mentoring Scheme

Abstract

The alta mentoring platform, launched within the aviation and aerospace industry in 2019, is the outcome of a joint knowledge exchange project between academics and industry. It was designed and launched to meet the mentoring needs of women in this male dominated industry, who otherwise had no, or very little, mentoring support. The aim of alta was to create an on-line mentoring platform that was based upon the mentoring support that women identified as being important and that would address their under-representation and the lack of support for career progression. The chapter draws upon a body of literature focussing upon mentoring, specifically its meanings (see Dashper, 2018), benefits (see Phillips et al., 2016) and barriers (see Eby et al., 2010); as well as gender specific mentoring (see Johns & McNamara, 2014). The authors adopt a feminist relational mentoring framework (Ragins, 2016), that views mentoring as a two-way process where mentors and mentees learn from each other. The project was under-pinned by six months of research across the industry (a survey, interviews and focus groups with professional women and employers) to ascertain the need for the mentoring platform. This chapter is based upon four focus groups held with women across the industry, in both technical and middle/senior managerial roles, to ascertain their experiences of mentoring and their perceived and experienced benefits and barriers to mentoring. The focus groups were also utilised to find out specifically what women wanted from the alta mentoring platform and their views on its women-only focus.

Citation

Durbin, S., Lopes, A., Warren, S. and Milne, J. (2022), "Relational Mentoring in the Aviation and Aerospace Industry: Meeting Women’s Needs Through the Alta Mentoring Scheme", Wright, T., Budd, L. and Ison, S. (Ed.) Women, Work and Transport (Transport and Sustainability, Vol. 16), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 169-187. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2044-994120220000016012