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Anyone who has made it into the upper echelons of the academic medical center arena - as researchers, department chairs or executive leaders - can probably name at least two individuals whose support and counsel contributed significantly to where they are today. Some might even go as far as saying that a mentors influence prompted a career-path choice - or made the difference between success and stagnation.

As academic medical centers, and medicine itself, become increasingly complex, obtaining the guidance of a willing, interested and engaged mentor is no longer simply a desirable option for junior faculty members. It's critical to their development, contends David Kennedy, M.D., vice dean for professional services at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and senior vice president of University of Pennsylvania Health System. "Finding and working with good mentors is actually more important than the promise of protected time. Good mentors truly can help junior faculty develop their career plans," Dr. Kennedy says.

Because of the complexity of academic medical centers and the oftentimes competing demands faculty members face, it's likely that they will need multiple mentors over the course of their careers. And junior faculty might be surprised to learn that some of the most helpful mentors they can have might not even be in their field, explains Vivian Reznik, M.D., MPH, a pediatric nephrologist who directs the National Centers of Leadership in Academic Medicine (NCLAM) program at University of California-San Diego.

"Today, most people think that over the life of a career you need more than one mentor. Life is more complicated than it used to be, and academic institutions are far more complicated than they used to be," Dr. Reznik, who spends approximately 30 percent of her time in NCLAM and related research activities, contends. "Just going through medical school and training, junior faculty don't learn many of the things they need to know to navigate this environment - they need mentors to help them." For example, young researchers are now expected to move very quickly into the business of managing their laboratories and the lab staff, tasks they've likely had no experience undertaking. In like manner, the young clinical faculty member must balance teaching, patient care and departmental responsibilities, in an era in which financial and human resources are stretched very thin at AMCs.

As such, a junior researcher might need one mentor to help her figure out with whom to collaborate and whether she should stay at her current institution or move to another one, yet another to help her figure out how to secure a larger portion of the departmental budget for needed staff or equipment resources. A clinician might seek the expertise of a department chair to help establish a new clinic, and a medical center executive's guidance in writing a "winning" business plan for the proposed venture.

How can young faculty members identify prospective mentors? When an institution offers a mentor program - whether it's a formal pairing structure, a loosely orchestrated voluntary arrangement, or a quarterly lecture series in which senior faculty members offer expertise in a group setting - that can facilitate identifying the initial mentor. When such offerings are not available, junior faculty should start with their content area and move out from there. "First look in your own local division, then a bit broader in your department," Dr. Reznik advises. After identifying "in-house" mentors, junior faculty should expand their scope beyond their institutions, to look for role models who might "help them figure out a pathway," she adds.

While that may sound logistically difficult, the Internet and e-mail have become valuable tools for establishing "virtual" mentor relationships with senior colleagues across the country or around the globe. "You really need to have more than one mentor in your cadre, and it's also useful to work with mentors from around the country," says Eve Higginbotham, M.D., chair of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. She notes that her "distant" mentors were invaluable in her early career, when she was becoming involved in multi-center clinical trials.

Yet Dr. Higginbotham credits her own first boss Morton Goldberg, M.D., who now directs Hopkins' Wilmer Eye Institute, with giving her a broader perspective on her field and its offerings. On the basis of her early experiences, Dr. Higginbotham today frequently serves in a mentor role with junior faculty in other institutions and even medical students seeking specialty-choice guidance. "I receive e-mail messages frequently from students or residents who are in other areas of the country, and I try to assist them if I can," she says. But she advises junior faculty to set their sights locally at first, in hope of finding mentors who might be more accessible on a regular basis to sit down over coffee or a lunch."