What makes a mentoring program effective

At universities, student mentoring is proven to improve student retention, boost job placement rates, and increase alumni engagement when tapping alumni as mentors. A thriving, impactful mentoring program is within your reach. They are built through thoughtful planning and sustained commitment to guiding participants through the mentoring process while continually improving the program.

Deciding to implement a mentoring program is a great strategy for improving employee metrics like retention. A report from PeopleFluent shows that 78 percent of millennials said being a part of a mentorship program made them feel more engaged with their organization.

As with any major project, proper planning is crucial to achieving your strategic goals. Mentoring programs can be highly impactful, but there are many factors that are critical to the success of your program. A formal mentoring program is a structured, often one-to-one relationship in a work, organization or academic setting.

A well-functioning mentoring program requires strategic planning and organization to connect people, increase knowledge and build skills for future goals and milestones. Impactful mentoring programs train mentors and mentees to have productive conversations and meetings, providing them with career development tools and resources to accomplish set goals.

When done right, a mentoring program in a professional setting is an enjoyable, rewarding experience for organizations and their people. A well-planned, thoughtful mentoring program will encourage people to connect with others on a personal level and build strong, trusting relationships that motivate and guide toward future goals.

Investing time in developing a well-organized mentoring program does not only support incoming professionals into the organization but also strengthen the skills of current professionals with, for example, management and collaborative goal-setting skills.

A mentoring program can also help students acclimate to college life, as well as prepare to graduate and enter the workforce. A mentoring program can help members of a professional association further their development and network with others in their industry.

A mentoring program benefits the mentee and mentor relationship and helps the organization by building an inclusive mentoring culture centered on learning, sharing new ideas, and creating a shared vision.

A mentorship program can diminish isolation and exclusivity, while increasing engagement, retention rates, and skill development. Read on to find out how you can create your own high-impact mentoring program in five steps. To answer these questions you will need to dive deep to understand your target audience. Make sure you understand who they are, where they are, their development needs, and their key motivations to participate.

Translate your vision into SMART objectives: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Objectives provide direction to program participants, establish program key performance indicators KPIs , and help organizational leaders understand why they should offer their support. Successful mentorship programs offer both structure and flexibility.

Structure provides participants a mentoring workflow to follow and is critical to help participants achieve productive learning that reaches defined goals. Similarly, flexibility is essential to support varying individual mentoring needs across specific learning goals, preferences, and learning style. A good idea is to create a program workflow diagram to explain each step of your program. You can provide details such as key actions, timeframes, support resources, and criteria for moving to the next phase.

Mark areas that will require some flexibility to support user needs. Mentoring software allows you to deliver a wide-variety of mentoring programs. The program aims to connect Aboriginal post-secondary students in the science, technology, engineering and math STEM disciplines with SRC mentors in the same or similar disciplines to help them take their education and experience to the next level. AMP includes mentoring throughout the school year to help set students up for success, along with meaningful summer employment and opportunities to help students develop skills and gain work experience that will help them in their studies and future careers.

For more information, visit the AMP webpage. Business Insight. Date Posted. November 08, By Rebecca Gotto. So, what makes a mentoring program successful and how can you ensure that success? Strategic Purpose This one is common sense. It may be helpful to sit down with all the stakeholders in your mentoring program and go through the following questions together: What do we want to achieve with this mentoring program?

What problems are we hoping to address? What does success look like for participants and the company? What metrics do we want to measure or achieve? Be thoughtful about your matching process Matching mentors and mentees is a process that, if not approached with care, can be prone to biases. Provide guidelines To set your mentors and mentees up for success, we recommend establishing general guidelines.

You can offer guidance in areas such as: Frequency of meeting between mentors and mentees How to track progress Expectations of both mentors and mentees How to navigate potential challenges While you want to offer some structure, you also want to build in flexibility.

Ensure your program is equitable As we mentioned before, there are a lot of biases that can trickle into your mentoring programs. Plan a successful launch A successful launch is critical to getting your program off on the right foot.

Measure the impact of your program Remember those goals we identified at the beginning? Share the results with the rest of the organization As your mentoring program grows, make sure everyone else at the company is aware of its success!

Coaching and Mentoring Five signs your mentorship is working. Aimee May 5, Coaching and Mentoring A cheat sheet for getting the most from your mentor. Coaching and Mentoring 7 amazing ways mentoring can benefit your organization. E-learning courses, like the ones we offer, are budget-friendly and take only a few hours to complete. Things to measure:. Using our examples, a merger might mean an influx of employees or a retraction.

The program needs to adjust accordingly. A new generation of workers might require the program to recalibrate to address this new generation's specific needs. To wit: as the Millennial generation began entering the workforce, companies had to rethink how they would mentor these new workers.

Some programs shifted from strict one-to-one models to more collaborative group models as result, since Millennials tend to flourish in collaborative environments.

The most successful mentoring programs have someone in charge. It sounds so simple, right? This person can field questions from people outside of the program e. Note: we acknowledge that not all companies have the budgets for full-blown software, which is precisely why we offer our Precision Matching tool as a standalone product at a reasonable price.