As an employer of young people, part of your job is to nurture the professional growth and career development of those young employees. By providing them with guidance, support, and opportunities for advancement, you can help them to take those vital first steps on the career ladder.
Setting up a mentoring scheme within your organisation is one of the best investments you can make in your young employees and their future success with the company. We will show you how to set up your mentoring scheme in 7 steps.
What are the benefits of a mentoring scheme?
Setting up a mentoring scheme for your young and entry-level employees offers numerous benefits to both the participants and your entire organisation. For example:
Skills development
Mentoring gives young employees opportunities to learn new skills, gain industry insights, and develop as professionals. This boosts their employability and enhances their career prospects as well as making them more valuable and effective members of your team.
Career advancement
Mentoring can help young employees to identify their ideal career paths, set personal and professional goals, and ultimately advance within your organisation.
Employee engagement
Mentoring fosters a sense of belonging and increases engagement among both young employees and their mentors, leading to higher rates of job satisfaction and employee retention.
Knowledge sharing
Mentoring helps with the smooth sharing of knowledge, expertise, and best practice from experienced employees to younger and less experienced colleagues, making everyone more efficient and productive.
Future leader development
Mentoring helps your young team members develop from entry-level employees into future leaders with the potential to achieve amazing things. Acting as mentors also helps more experienced employees to develop their leadership skills.
Did you know, we help employers like you develop their youth employment strategy?
How to set up a mentoring scheme
Now that you understand all the ways that a mentoring scheme can benefit your organisation and your employees, how do you go about setting one up? Here’s our quick seven-step guide to help you get started.
1. Define your objectives and goals
The first step towards setting up a successful mentoring scheme is to understand what you want it to achieve. That’s why you need to identify clear objectives and goals. Do you want to support young people in their career development, enhance leadership skills across the company, foster a culture of learning and growth, or improve employee retention?
Remember to ensure that all your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
2. Find your participants
Next, it’s time to recruit the mentors and mentees who will take part in your mentoring scheme. Mentors should be experienced employees who would like to share their knowledge, skills, and expertise with younger and less experienced colleagues. They should be kind, patient, and empathetic people with excellent interpersonal skills.
Mentees should be younger or less experienced employees who are new to the world of work, new to their roles, or looking to advance in their careers.
3. Match your mentors and mentees
There’s an art to pairing mentors and mentees together, and you might not get it right the first time. Consider factors such as personality, availability, and shared interests and career goals when you begin pairing people up.
If there’s a clash or a mentor and mentee simply don’t work well together, make it as easy as possible for them to switch to somebody else. Mentors and mentees who do not get along or work well together will not be effective.
4. Establish clear guidelines
Once you have paired up your mentors and mentees, establish clear guidelines and expectations for the mentoring scheme.
For example, how often will mentors and mentees be expected to meet? How long will meetings last and what format will they take? How long will the mentoring relationship last, and is there the possibility of extending it (or terminating it early) if both parties wish to? What goals and objectives are to be achieved and how will these be measured?
Make sure that these guidelines are communicated to mentors and mentees, ideally in writing, and that all participants know where to go if they have any questions or problems.
5. Provide training and support
Before the mentoring scheme officially begins, offer training and support to both mentors and mentees to ensure that they understand their roles and responsibilities within the mentoring relationship.
Provide guidance on effective communication, goal setting, feedback, confidentiality, and what to do if the mentoring relationship is not working out. It’s also a good idea to offer resources and support on an ongoing basis throughout the scheme. This can help both mentors and mentees to navigate challenges and get as much benefit as possible from the mentoring experience.
6. Foster relationship building
The best mentoring schemes allow mentors and mentees to build strong professional relationships based on trust, mutual respect, and open communication. For this to work, it is vital for them to have the opportunity to meet regularly and to give and receive constructive feedback.
Encourage mentees to take ownership of their professional development and to actively seek guidance and support from their mentors. Remind them that their mentors are there for them and that the more they put into the scheme, the more they will get out. Remind mentors, too, to check in with their mentees regularly to see how everything is going and find out if they need any help or support.
7. Evaluate your scheme and make adjustments
Remember those goals we set back in step one? Once your mentoring scheme has been running for a few months, it’s time to revisit those goals and evaluate how effectively your mentoring scheme is meeting them.
Gather feedback from both mentors and mentees, and measure relevant outcomes such as employee satisfaction, skills development, career progression, and employee retention rates. Chances are you’ll find that some things are working well and others need to be adjusted. As you go along, you can use this information to refine and adjust your mentoring scheme to make it the best it can possibly be.
