Mentoring labor market integration of migrants: Policy insights from a survey of mentoring theory and practice

The paper synthetizes the academic research on mentoring and discusses its relevance for the design of labor market integration policies for migrants. The review covers several research fields, including education, management, organizational theory, psychology and economics. From each field, we discuss the outcomes that are potentially relevant to the design of mentoring as an instrument of job search assistance. We also review these results in terms of their contribution to the identification of outcome and control variables that should be accounted for in the evaluations of mentoring programs. In doing so, the paper shows that both specific features of the programs as well as the general context, including human, institutional, financing and political constraints, are relevant in limiting or enabling the effectiveness of mentoring as part of the overall design of migration policies.