The Mentoring Survey: Results
Last week I introduced the mentoring Survey. You are free to take the survey if you haven’t yet. You’ll find it HERE. I’ll continue to update any significant changes or swing in numbers, which may occur.
This week I’ve talked about mentoring, here are those posts in the order they appeared.
In this series, I’ve written about:
5 Questions to Help You Know What to do with a Mentor
This is not the end of this discussion, but hopefully you’ll see a few trend in the results of this survey. Over 200 people have taken the survey at this point.
This is encouraging, as almost 75% of people say they have had a mentor.
Again, 75% say they have been a mentor. I suspect this number is higher than this, when considering some of the types of mentors I discussed earlier in this series. Interestingly, this percent started much lower and increased steadily as the series continued and more people took the survey.
It could be the nature of my readership, but I found it interesting that the number of people who say they are mentoring is so much larger than the number being mentored.
People were fairly split on this answer of whether a mentor should be the same sex. There’s more to this issue I may address later. I did share my thoughts with someone asking my opinion on my Facebook page.
Most people seem to know what they the term mentoring means…at least as they define it I suppose. 
85% say they could currently use a mentor in their life…Wow! I realize some of those may have a mentor and I purposefully didn’t give that qualifier, because in this question I was trying to capture the recognition of need. 11% say maybe…I am most curious about the 3% who said no, that they didn’t currently need a mentor. Hopefully that’s because they already have one.
I was a little surprised here…and excited…and perhaps disappointed all at the same time. The greatest need seems to be for a spiritual mentor. That’s great news that people recognize it, but it makes me wonder if the church is meeting this need. I wish the need for a relational mentor had been higher…just saying…Most often you don’t know you need one there until you need one.
No commentary here, but it does appear a majority of people recognize the age of the mentor could matter, depending on the circumstance.
The largest number of people believe a weekly meeting with a mentor is needed, others see an as needed or monthly meeting as an option. Very few took the quarterly approach, though I believe in a very structured setting, a quarterly mentor could work well for overall life planning and wisdom sharing. I may post more about this later.
What are your thoughts or observations from this survey? It would have been nice to have some commentary from those taking the survey, but I wanted a large enough response and knew open ended questions get fewer responses that are harder to categorize and measure.
Should I consider doing a shorter survey now with open-ended questions? Give me your thoughts.
BTW, I honestly didn’t get a lot of new resources in question 10 on the survey, but may share some resources in a future post. If you know of good ones, please feel free to share.
What’s next? Where should I focus my attention if I want to continue to stir this discussion?
