The Research On The Relationship Between Mentoring And Performance Of Engineering Master Based On Competency

Cultivating the practical ability of Engineering Masters has become a highly valued topic in both the academic and educational fields, which promotes researches from theoretical and practical aspects. The purpose of establishing full-time Engineering Master’s degree is to help Engineering Masters to gain awareness of hands-on practice, improve the professional attainments and problem-solving skills. Therefore, the evaluation of full-time Engineering Master’s training results and how to optimize the arrangements of full-time post-graduates’ practical experiences, became key issues that colleges and universities should pay attention to. A considerable body of literature focuses on the training modes of Engineering Master and development challenges, there has been little research done to quantitatively evaluate this group’s training quality and explore relationships between other related variables and their competency. However, the cultivation of Engineering Master’s practical ability is a complex and lengthy task, which is dynamic and influenced by diverse factors. In addition, in order to improve the professional quality and ability, the whole process requires not only the full support from colleges, universities and the active cooperation of companies, but also the learning initiatives of full-time post-graduates.Based on the above background, this study introduces competency theory, it develops the construct idea of Engineering Master’s competency and put forward an hypothesis regarding the relationships between extramural academic advisor’s guiding behavior, Engineering Master’s competency and their job performance. To further support the hypothesis, using the multiple regression analytical method, a survey was conducted on 769 full-time Engineering Masters from South China University of technology that participated in industry practices. The final conclusion reveals that the extramural academic advisor’s guidance lead to a significant positive impact on Engineering Master’s competency, which then reflects in a significant positive effect on their job performance. Engineering Master’s competency plays a partial intermediary role between extramural advisors’ mentoring and Engineering Master’s job performance. Then on the basis of above empirical conclusions, this article proposes deficiencies, innovation opportunities, management insight and future research directions.The main contributions of this study are as follows:(1) On one hand, indicating Engineering Masters as the research objective, develop the Engineering Master’s competency model and the corresponding scale to evaluate the full-time Engineering Master’s competency level, which fills in the blank for this particular field of research;(2)On the other hand, employing empirical method to study the relations among the extramural academic advisor’s guiding behavior, Engineering Master’s competency and job performance based on the primary data collected from field surveys, demonstrate mentor’s positive role playing and discloses the interactive mechanism between extramural academic advisors and Engineering Master’s job performance.