[ted]

I basically spent 25 years of my career mentoring new inexperienced air traffic controllers. As an air traffic controller after you were a full performance level controller you were expected to always (mentor) have a developmental controller assigned to you.
The developmental controller would work on your ticket and you would have an override on his radio control transmissions for on the spot corrections. At our facility this would take about a year of daily training till the developmental either was certified or washed out.

I think the toughest part was spending a year working very closely with a developmental writing and conducting training session de-briefs on every minute spent training. Hearing stories of their asperations and family life but to know after a few months of working together that a developmental was not progressing. Tough to then have to continue to write about the develomental's training failures and start a paper trail toward justifying a developmental's training termination. Great when they succeed but the lows of failure were very tough for the developmental and the instructor too.

In racing I have had 4 mentors (some mechanics, some drivers some were both) and every mentor I choose has been an improvement.
So my racing mentors have been extremely helpful to my amateur racing and race car prep.
My current mentor was an engineer for 10 years with Richard Childress racing.
Funny I had a couple of mentors that when I would ask questions about car set up they answered honestly that "you need an engineer to find that answer".
I'm thinking then how are we running these cars with out an engineer, that would be by the seat of the pants. lol
Having an engineer as a mentor deleted 90% of the seat of the pants experience and instead increased driver and car confidence by 100%.