As the depth of experience within the educational sector moves toward retirement, those moving into mid-management and senior management roles need the guidance and insights that only years of first hand experience can provide.
The variety of daily pressures within today's educational environments placed on those experienced administrators who are within the organization permits limited time to allocate to mentoring new administrators. Often new managers are left to learn through trial and error, and valuable time and resources are lost due to inexperience... as well as contributing to potential damage to institutional internal and external relationships, including possible union complications where collective agreements are present.
Having a consistent resource available for new administrators to provide timely advice and mentorship on human resources management, financial management, conflict resolution, and union relations will pay dividends for the organization, as well as build the confidence and progressive professional growth of new administrators.
Ideally, experienced administrators should allocate time for progressive development of new administrators. Where organizations cannot manage the time and resources required to mentor new administrators, the engagement of external resources should be considered. When this critical resource is neglected, the result tends to be that issues will work their way up through the organization creating even more of an untimely bottleneck of work seeking solutions from those individuals with the knowledge and experience.