OSOT Mentorship Program
Welcome to the OSOT Mentorship Program
Purpose of the OSOT Mentorship Program
The OSOT Mentorship Program is about members supporting members, and aims to facilitate a member’s access to member occupational therapists who are willing to assume a mentorship role with the goal of enabling a meaningful mentorship relationship. Through a member-protected on-line portal, OTs seeking mentors can search the OSOT database to find potential mentors with the skills and experience they are looking for.
What is Mentorship?
Wikipedia defines Mentorship as: "a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. The mentor may be older or younger, but has a certain area of expertise. It is a learning and development partnership between someone with experience and someone who wants to learn."
Mentorship from an experienced clinician can play an important role in supporting occupational therapists whether newly graduated, new to Ontario, new to a practice area, or re-entering the profession to achieve their personal and professional goals. The beauty of this partnership is that it can be just as rewarding for the mentor. Through communicating, answering questions, and spending time reflecting about practice, mentors have found that the mentorship partnership has enhanced awareness about their abilities and about the profession as a whole.
The OSOT Mentorship Process
The OSOT Mentorship Program provides a framework for a self-directed approach to mentorship. Collaboratively, mentors and mentees may decide to either engage in a more informal partnership – i.e.: ad-hoc emails, calls, etc., or something more formal whereby a contract is signed, a meeting schedule is established, expectations are communicated, etc. Regardless of which option you choose, OSOT has some resources that can help during this process.
“A wise teacher learns in the midst of teaching; a wise student teaches in the midst of learning.”
- Mollie Marti