Mentoring

Mentorship plays a vital role in career progression by providing personalized guidance, support, and valuable insights that help early career researchers navigate career pathways, take career decisions, expand their networks, develop skills, and accelerate their professional growth. We have two Mentorship programs available, a Helmholtz-wide Mentoring program and a KIT mentoring program.

The COMPASS Mentoring Program is a Helmholtz-wide Mentoring Program targeted to postdocs and science managers in the research field "Earth and Environment". It was initiated in 2022 and runs annually. It wants to support them in their personal career development and their professional networking, within and outside academia, so that they can take informed and strategic decisions with regard to their future career pathways. The 18-month program consists of 4 workshops specifically tailored to career situations in science and science management, regular meetings between the program participants and their mentors and networking with the peer group.

X-Ment is the mentoring program at KIT that has been supporting the personal and professional development and decision-making of doctoral students and postdocs since 2012. X-Ment offers four thematic sprints over a period of around one year covering the  topics: 1. Openness & networking, 2. Responsibility & leadership, 3. My value for the organization, 4. Agility & digital collaboration. In parallel, a mentoring relationship is established and actively shaped independently. The programme begins and ends with a joint workshop.