The idea of "mentoring" has always been a hot topic in the system administration community. This is reflected in the roots of the SAGE name, recognizing that the commmunity was (at that time) more like a Guild than a rigidly-defined and codified academic discipline. SAGE tried to create mentoring programs several times, but they never really took off, yet there were always people willing to take up the gauntlet again and again. At the first planning meeting for LOPSA (August 2005), we spent a lot of time talking about community and we seemed to all agree that mentoring was one of the most important parts of the community we were planning to serve. This topic was again raised at the LOPSA Community Meeting at LISA (December 2005) as one that our members felt strongly about. When we ask our members about what should be our highest priority services, a "mentoring program" always ranks near the top of the list.

We as a community seem to want a mentoring program, but before we begin again, shouldn't we ask ourselves, Why have sysadmin mentoring programs been less than stellar successes?

I believe that this commitment to mentoring and refusal to give up on it is a combination of the belief that mentoring was important to the community, and a strong desire to "pay forward" what had been paid to each of us.

I've spoken to literally a thousand or more system administrators over the years and they all have stories about the people they worked with and the lessons they learned from them. When you ask how people got into system administration, they always talk about where they've been and what they learned, focusing on "life lessons" and people, not coursework and degrees. Our community is built upon the oral tradition and mentoring is at the heart of that culture, especially informal mentoring.

I guess that what all the advocates of mentoring are seeking is a way to codify, nuture, support and enhance the experience that we all shared, as a way of paying back to the community that "raised us" from sysadmin-childhood.

At the heart of this, they're right. Mentoring is a critical part of the "sysadmin experience", and its roots run deep in our community.

And mentoring works, and not just for us. The business community, that part that worries about leadership and responsibilty and ethics, sees mentoring as crucial to the success success. Look at leadership training, the Harvard Business Review, and other progressive business forces, and they see mentoring as a way to keep a business true to its core values and responsibilities. The medical profession has certainly hidden a mentoring program as part of the training of each and every doctor. Almost every teacher is involved in a mentoring program during their training.

So, what will it take to create a strong mentoring program? What should be the goals of such a program? Only after we know the true goals of mentporing can we produce a strong, viable and useful program.

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