by Elizabeth Manning Murphy DE and Ted Briggs AE, Joint program coordinators.
Welcome to IPEd’s Mentoring Program for editors. A little background: it started as a small local program for members of the Canberra Society of Editors (CSE), in 2012.
In 2013, we introduced the program to everyone at the IPEd conference in Fremantle. Western Australia liked the idea and asked if they could join in. From there, it spread rapidly. One after the other, all the states joined in and by the next IPEd conference in Canberra in 2015, we were calling ourselves ‘national’.
At that conference IPEd and CSE reached an agreement that it would henceforth be known as the IPEd Mentoring Program. We now have all Australian branches on board, and recently welcomed a representative from Aotearoa, New Zealand branch, to a coordinators’ meeting.
It is very flexible, in that editors can be mentored in any aspect of editing that is of concern to them. In our program, a mentor is a guide and friend, as in the classical sense of ‘mentor’. Both mentors and mentees are finding the mentorship experience really rewarding.
We look forward to hearing from anyone, from any branch of IPEd or the CSE, who would like to be guided through some aspect of our profession or who would like to offer their knowledge, experience and skills to guide a mentee.