1. Design Your Mentoring Program
The starting point for any mentoring program begins with two important questions:
1.Why are you starting this program?
2.What does success look like for participants and the organization?
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 mentoring 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.
Key design decisions include:
Enrollment – is it open, application, or invite only?
Mentoring style – can be traditional, flash, reverse
Connection type – possibly 1:1, group, or project
Connection duration – typically weeks or months, or perhaps even just a single session
Community/social aspects beyond formal mentoring, tracking and reporting needs.
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. Regardless if a small or large program, mentoring software is easy to configure and will save you time and cost in getting your program started and running smoothly