Mentoring refugees to work: an intercultural perspective

The article examines how cultural conceptions of mentoring shape pre employment support for refugees in Europe, a context marked by unprecedented levels of forced displacement and persistent refugee–native employment gaps. While mentoring is increasingly promoted as an instrument for refugees' labour market integration, existing studies rarely investigate how the cultures of mentors and mentees influence the mentoring relationship itself. Addressing this gap, the research explores how European mentors and refugee mentees understand mentoring to work and how these understandings structure expectations and interactions. The research adopts a qualitative design. Fifteen mentoring dyads participating in a mentoring programme in Luxembourg were investigated through interviews. The analysis uses a thematic approach to reconstruct the implicit cultural models mobilised by both sides of the dyad. Findings highlight significant differences in focus and conception between mentors and mentees. European mentors tend to frame mentoring as a professional project centred on individual employability, self presentation and alignment with perceived labour market norms. Refugee mentees, in contrast, often place stronger emphasis on relational support to access employment. Across dyads, the interaction of these perspectives contributes to the construction of normative figures of the "good migrant" and the "good mentor", which can both enable and constrain mentees' agency. Practically, the study suggests that mentoring schemes should systematically integrate intercultural reflexivity, explicit expectation setting and support for negotiating role definitions.