The development and evaluation of a mentor training program for those working with autistic adults

This paper evaluates the training developed for potential mentors wanting to work with autistic adults to enable them to work towards their chosen goals. It then gives some initial findings of how the mentoring worked in practice. Research Autism provided the funding to offer a one day training event free to adults who expressed a wish to work as a mentor. Fifty people were trained and 45 of these completed a feedback form. This provided excellent information on the content and delivery. The most highly rated aspect of the training was the fact the much of the content was developed and delivered by autistic adults. The most often cited way to enhance the training would to extend this to two days as a great deal was packed into the day. Not all those who attended the training went on to act as mentors but it was felt they would have gained from receiving the training. It was felt that short-term, goal oriented mentoring was likely to be the most effective. There is little data presented on the goals the mentors worked on and with what degree of success as that is the subject of future papers. Instead the focus was on the training offered. It came to light that some of the mentors who did start to work with autistic adults were not reliable and so future training will stress the importance of this. A key point throughout the paper is the need to involve autistic individuals in training and interventions designed for autistic people. Such work is slowly developing and becoming more common and this paper adds to the literature on this.