Electronic mentoring through asynchronous methods using technologies such as e-mail or the Internet is used in the education industry whereby undergraduate and graduate students can be matched with either university professors or career professionals. However, corporate organizations with mentoring initiatives predominantly use traditional face-to-face mentoring. E-mentoring is an extension of traditional face-to-face mentoring. It is not an intervention meant to replace traditional mentoring, but much like e-learning, e-mentoring can benefit organizations by capturing behavior patterns, improving performance, maximizing the frequency of contact by meeting virtually. Common issues affecting mentoring programs are the location of participants, lack of available and qualified mentors, frequency of meeting, intimidation, and trust. These mentoring issues were analyzed in e-mentoring relationships with a focus on the theoretical foundations of human resource development, which are economic theory, systems theory, and psychological theory. This study revealed best practices in e-mentoring and provided enriching qualitative data from four e-mentoring relationships.
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