Conjunto de datos: Development of mentoring programs for early career faculty: Promoting success in research universities in Chile

According to the Times Higher Education ranking (2022), the top 50 most prestigious universities worldwide have a mentoring program to support, promote, and retain their faculty. It should be noted that none of these universities are based in Latin America. The general objective of this study is to understand what faculty and administrators understand by mentoring and what strategies they are considering for implementing formal mentoring programs for faculty in research universities in Chile. Research universities are essential for creating and disseminating knowledge, educating new generations of leaders across disciplines and professions, and maintaining global communication and collaboration research networks (Altbach, 2007). Faculty members are the ones who carry out the functions of teaching, research, and service that characterize higher education as an institution. Due to the importance of the development of the academic staff, higher education institutions increasingly have used mentoring programs for faculty development (Kiel, 2019). Mentoring and mentoring programs generally have benefits for mentees and mentors that can be immediate or long-lasting. Some benefits for the mentees are improvement of teaching and research skills (Shieh & Cullen, 2019), an increase in scholarly productivity (Blanco & Qualters, 2020; Bredella et al., 2021; Cranmer et al., 2018; McRae & Zimmerman, 2019; Sandi & Chubinskaya, 2020), higher retention levels (Cranmer et al., 2018; Sandi & Chubinskaya, 2020), lower burnout rates (Bredella et al., 2021), better work-life integration and work and family balance (Bredella et al., 2021). Mentoring can be formal or informal. Institutions of higher education often have formal programs in place since are said to be better suited to guarantee inclusion, diversity, and equal accessibility (Irby et al., 2019). The primary role of a mentor is to guide during the rite from novice to professional academic (Lyons, Scroggins, and Rule 1990). A mentor can act as a bridge between the mentee and his/her academic community to facilitate the mentee's integration process by promoting his/her visibility and expanding his/her social network (Smith, 2007; Bäker, Muschallik, Pull, 2020). However, making the right match between a mentor and a mentee can be complex. Not all academics be suitable to be a mentor in fact, there are specific desirable characteristics of a mentor, such as expertise, professional integrity, honesty, accessibility, approachability, motivation, respect by peers in the field, and supportiveness and encouragement (Berk, Berg, Mortimer, Walton-Moss, Yeo, 2005). In contrast to the amount of literature on mentoring programs and models focused on faculty members in the global north, there is less information, both in theory and practice, about this topic in Latin America and even less in Chile. Given that research universities tend to hire full-time academics who dedicate their time to the three main functions of teaching, research, and outreach, we decided to select six research universities in Chile. Our research design is qualitative, with a case study design (Yin, 2014). Data will be gathered from institutional documents from each institution and in-depth interviews with faculty members and administrators from both hard and soft sciences: engineering and social sciences. These two contrasting disciplinary fields were chosen since Social sciences, and STEM-related fields differ in the number of female faculty, who are outnumbered by male representatives in science and engineering degrees (Dajani et al., 2021; Rockinson-Szapkiw & Wendt, 2021). This study seeks to find what administrators and academics understand by mentoring and what strategies and difficulties they face in setting up mentoring programs for academics in research universities to promote academic career success. The findings hope to contribute to the Chilean and Latin American literature on this topic and provide empirical evidence to those institutions wishing to design and implement mentoring programs for academics in Latin American contexts.