2019 EDSIG Proceedings - Abstract Presentation

Speed Mentoring of Information Systems Students: A Multi-Stage Mentorship Model for Improved Recruitment, Retention, Internship and Career Placement of IS/IT Students

Alex B Citurs
Eastern Connecticut State University

Abstract
Growing demands by employers for more business-tech savvy interns and career hire graduates across a wide range of IS/IT career path areas, coupled with a shrinking incoming collegiate demographic of prospective students have placed additional pressure on Information Systems/Information Technology faculty and administrators to increase initial student recruitment numbers and improve successful program completion retention numbers. Likewise, business-technical employers are wanting to improve their successful recruitment and retention of a larger number of highly productive flexible, well-matched and highly skilled interns and career hires to meet their growing biz-tech employee needs. This paper outlines the borrowing of the basic concept of speed dating/mentoring as first widely adopted and successfully implemented by graduate medical schools to that of an information systems program at a small liberal arts school. The paper then goes on to present an expanded business-technology student focused academic career long, multi-stage model of speed mentoring utilizing various program stakeholder and alumni groups at multiple types of special student events to promote greater student numbers, academic, internship and career readiness and a general esprit de corps. The paper continues by presenting some initial expanded model results and findings. The paper concludes by suggesting other potential modifications to the model and calls for additional research and analysis on the subject.

Recommended Citation: Citurs, A. B., (2019). Speed Mentoring of Information Systems Students: A Multi-Stage Mentorship Model for Improved Recruitment, Retention, Internship and Career Placement of IS/IT Students . Proceedings of the EDSIG Conference, (2019) n.5007, Cleveland, Ohio