Mentoring, as defined in Oxford Dictionary, is “the practice of helping and advising a less experienced person over a period of time, especially as part of a formal program in a company, university, etc.”
As we face difficult times with new challenges in the energy industry, we must strive to enhance both soft skills and technical skills, while continuing to strengthen our community. Mentoring programs provide mutually beneficial, win-win relationships to accomplish these goals, demonstrated by outstanding results for both mentors and mentees in organizations and companies that have implemented them.
To support our members, the AAPG Women’s Network is launching the AAPGWN Mentoring Program – a tool for promoting women and supporting their career development within the energy industry and related fields.
The goal of the program is to build a cohesive community of geoscientists in the energy industry, improve career development resources for women and minorities, and increase knowledge sharing among our global members. This program has been carefully planned over the last year to add significant value to our community.
A diverse group of mentors (gender, ethnicity, race, age) are invited to contribute to this program by helping develop mentees through active listening, sharing industry knowledge, and “lessons learned” through failures and achievements, while providing feedback and advice to mentees.Mentors may benefit by being exposed to online and social media trends and gain awareness about ever-evolving diversity and inclusion ideologies, trends and topics.We view this as a way to embrace the millennial and upcoming GenZ population in the workforce and make sustainable, cross-generational relationships and viewpoints. Our goal is for mentors to remain relevant to the younger generations to influence and positively impact the future.
Women and individuals who identify as being a woman who apply to become AAPG member mentees should be interested in expanding their capabilities, willing to ask for help and accept feedback, and be proactive and responsible.Women who are first-generation college graduates and energy geoscientists may find this program of high value in order to receive mentoring from compassionate senior geoscientists.With a growing number of geoscientists from “non-traditional” backgrounds of greater diversity, mentoring programs like this will be key in retaining women and minorities long term and helping early career geoscientists navigate their careers through the energy transition.
Interested applicants will complete forms with matching criteria (for example, “What topics are you most interested in being mentored in?”), and mentor-mentee matches will begin a formal mentoring cycle in January 2021. After a virtual kick-off event early January, pairs are encouraged to meet virtually six times between January and April 2021.
This program is sponsored by AAPG and is intended to take place on an annual basis. You do not have to be an AAPG member to mentor, however, mentees are required to join AAPG (Chevron membership scholarship is available). AAPGWN is looking for sponsorships for 2021-2022 fiscal year to continue its Mentoring Program after April, 2021. Please email us at [email protected] for more sponsorship information. Special thank you AAPGWN Publicity Director, Amanda Pascali for creating the artwork for this article.