Currently submitted to: Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Date Submitted: Mar 25, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 30, 2026 - May 25, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Designing Digital Mentorship: A Certificate Model for Faculty Development
ABSTRACT
Faculty mentorship programs are essential mechanisms for promoting career development, institutional retention, and academic leadership in medical universities. Yet the design, digital delivery, and structured implementation of such programs within international medical institutions remain underexplored. This paper describes the rationale, design, and implementation of the Empower Xchange (EX) Foundations in Mentorship Certificate—a 16-hour, digitally delivered professional development program developed at St. George’s University (SGU), Grenada, West Indies, through a cross-departmental collaboration between the School of Medicine Faculty Mentoring Program and the Leadership Excellence in Academics and Development (LEAD) Division. Drawing on faculty needs assessments, evidence-based pedagogical frameworks, and accreditation standards, the program delivers a structured mentorship training curriculum via the institution’s Learning Management System (Sakai), supplemented by Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. The certificate course is organized around five core design pillars: orientation and training, mentor-mentee responsibilities, learning resources, authentic engagement, and recognition and celebration. Instructional strategies include scenario-based tasks, reflective practice, peer mentoring circles, goal-setting frameworks, and portfolio building, organized through a mnemonic competency framework (3Ps, 2Ts, 1C). Mentorship goals are anchored across five developmental domains: leadership, teaching, curriculum development, research, and career advancement. Early implementation outcomes indicate meaningful faculty engagement across career stages and departments within the School of Medicine. The paper presents a replicable, five-pillar framework that other international health professions education institutions may adapt to design their own digitally delivered mentorship certificate programs. Implications for faculty development practitioners, program designers, and institutional leaders are discussed, along with limitations and directions for future outcome evaluation.
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.