The Faculty Advancement and Mentoring Excellence (FAME) program at the University of Florida College of Medicine- Jacksonville strives to engage faculty and promote faculty advancement through offering of institutional support, and mentorship.
Goals: FAME recognizes faculty challenges in balancing clinical, teaching, research, and work-life responsibilities in the current healthcare environment. The goal of FAME is to help faculty in refining career goals, pace of career, workload, and work/life balance, as well as to provide guidance on resources to support success in some of the following areas per the faculty needs and interests:
- Teaching and presentation skills, curriculum development, teaching portfolios
- Clinical practice strategies, quality improvement methodologies
- Program development, scientific innovations
- Professional visibility, locally and nationally; involvement in professional societies
- Understanding of organizational culture: structure, politics, and management
- Strategic planning, leadership skills, negotiation and conflict resolution techniques, personnel supervision, budgets
- Advocacy
- Sponsorship
Duration/Cadence: The FAME Program is designed to last two years with an option for participants to continue into subsequent years until a certain milestone is reached. At a minimum, the program requires a quarterly meeting between the mentor and mentee.
Platform/Resources: FAME will use MentorClick as the platform for enrolling in the program, matching mentors and mentees, tracking progress and providing mentor and/or mentee training content to ensure program’s quality. We will also share other national resources for mentoring from the AAMC and other organizations.
Outcomes: As part of the evaluation of FAME, we will consider short-term and long-term outcomes, such as mentee satisfaction, mentor satisfaction, skill acquisition, competence and confidence attainment, successful promotion and tenure, role attainment, and retention. Mentoring aimed at professional development and faculty success is not simply instructional — it is relational, enabling the mentee to build a more robust capacity as a faculty member. It also has the potential of benefiting both mentees and mentors. Ultimately, the success of FAME is rooted in open communication, mutual respect, and a commitment to growth. Generational differences should be recognized and embraced in the mentoring relationships.
