The aim of this paper is to analyse the French system of the monitorat. The monitorat d'initiation à l'enseignement supérieur is a system of faculty development for lecturers. However, looking beyond the faculty development component, the monitorat, as many financial support mechanisms, is likely to have an effect on the completion rate, the duration of the thesis and the career outcomes of individuals. With a survey carried out by the Research Institute on Economics of Education (Iredu) in 2001, we estimate these effects of the monitorat, all things being equal. We show, for example, that, even if the unique official goal of the monitorat was to increase the pedagogical skills of the lecturers, the induced effect of the monitorat is to increase the probability of becoming academics for the Ph.D. students who benefited from this system, other things equal. In the first part of the paper, we present the main features of the monitorat. The moniteurs are students chosen among the Ph.D. students who receive grants from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The moniteurs receive instructional development designed to increase their pedagogical skills. It involves instructional technology, media, courses and curricula. We show that the duration, the contents and the organisation of the monitorat are not, in many cases, as satisfactory as they should be. Nevertheless, the monitorat is an interesting first step towards a generalised faculty development system in France. In the second part of the paper, we analyse the specific effect of the monitorat. With various data, we show that the monitorat seems to have an effect on the duration and the completion rates of the doctorate. Then, with the survey carried out at the Iredu on 500 Ph.D. graduates in science and engineering, we show that the monitorat has a strong effect on the career outcomes of the students who receive this training. With the estimation of statistical models on these individual data, we show that the probability of having a tenured academic position is far greater for the moniteurs than for the other Ph.D. students, all things being equal. We control for a complete set of characteristics such as the nature of the research activity during the thesis, the number of articles published during the thesis or during the post- doc period, the career aspirations and various socio- demographics characteristics. Even once all of these variables are taken into account, the positive effect of the monitorat on the probability of becoming academics persists.