For the largely unregulated field of mentoring/coaching to boost it's professional credibility, increase it's level of accountability as expected of professionals and to provide clients with quality assurance it would be prudent to embrace supervision of practice. Supervision has been the mainstay of other professional helping professions such as counselling, social work and psychology.
There are four professional international associations for mentoring/coaching, all of which have as their goal the promotion of best practice and raising awareness and standards across the sector. Whilst these professional bodies have codes of ethics and good practice guidelines, and they promote the practice of supervision, supervision is not mandatory.
