In an ideal world, every ECA should have access to a mentor to guide them professionally and help them along the way. Some universities offer this as a service, but you lose the perk as soon as you graduate or transition to professional life. Mentoring sometimes continues informally, but finding a new mentor with the right expertise can be challenging, especially now that conferences are no longer held in person.

Young archaeology professionals are among those most needing guidance and support, particularly to balance the pressures between securing a good job and pursuing their own research agenda. Incidentally most, if not all, professional archaeologists have struggled to be where they are (read our interviews), hence there is a lot of goodwill and solidarity between generations if you know where to look. We want to tap into this pool of talent and expertise to bring archaeology forward. The path to an archaeology career does not have to be a lonely one!

To create a safe environment for ECAs who seek guidance, support and feedback regarding their professional development.

To create an intergenerational support network for ECAs available to everyone, irrespective of their age, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background. Depending on who signs up for the mentoring, we hope to make the programme available to archaeologists in the academic, commercial and heritage sectors.

To help ECAs establish themselves professionally, gain skills and experience.

If you sign up we ask you to indicate what area you need help with (for mentees) and what experience you can bring (for mentors), for instance ‘experience acquiring third-party funding’.

For now the ECA task force will take care of the matchmaking process and suggest potential matches. In the future we hope to move to a system in which a list of mentors is available to choose from, based on the experience requested.

Once we have matched you up, it’s very much up to you how you want to proceed with the mentoring. For instance you can decide to have regular Skype meetings with your mentee or only exchange e-mails here and there.

We only ask you to participate in a short online training event at the start of the mentoring and to fill in two survey forms, six months apart, to give us an idea of how successful the mentoring was (e.g. have you stayed in contact with the mentee?). We are appealing to volunteers and cannot unfortunately offer pay.

Yes, we ask you to sign up to our code of conduct when enrolling. This is to make sure that you are aware of what the mentoring process involves and what our expectations are.