A study examined mentoring as a means of furthering the career development of managers, technicians, and highly skilled workers employed by Motorola Incorporated, which has had a formal mentoring program in operation since 1980. Senior managers and new employees who were paired in Motorola's mentoring program were surveyed to determine their perceptions regarding the need for mentoring help, the effort expended in gaining mentoring help, the help received, and the effectiveness of help received. Formally assigned mentors were not the proteges' primary source of mentoring help. Proteges did not find the mentoring relationships as helpful as their mentors believed them to be, and mentors did not feel that proteges put as much effort into finding help as the proteges stated. Exclusive one-to-one mentoring relationships proved to be quite rare and, in most cases, could not be successfully mandated by the company. The proteges recognized a need for mentoring help, made efforts to obtain help, and managed to obtain most of the help they needed from sources within the Motorola organization. A mentoring system designed as a protege-driven open system in which proteges seek and receive needed mentoring help from a number of sources was recommended. (Contains 26 tables, 2 figures, and 133 references.) (MN)