Mentoring is a great way to boost your career, either as a mentee working with a more experienced mentor to guide and support you through career challenges; or as a mentor using your skills and experience to help mentees whilst gaining new perspectives.

Our mentoring platform is designed to help you connect and get the best out of a mentoring relationship.

Register

The first step is to register on our mentoring platform; to do that simply click here (insert URL link to your mentoring platform) and register as either a mentor, mentee or both.

Profile

Once you have registered, the next step is to complete your profile. For mentors this information will help us to match you to mentees who are looking for your skills and experience, for mentees it provides the information to enable us to suggest potential mentors based on the matching criteria you select.

Search

Once a mentee has completed their profile, they will be shown a broad list of potential mentors who match the criteria they selected, with the closest matches at the top of the list, moving down the list to show mentors who meet some of your criteria, but not all. You can change the search criteria and you can narrow your search down by selecting to do an exact match  

Ask a Questions

Mentees can then view the mentor’s profile and have the option to just ask them a question, this could be to help solve a specific issue or it may be to ask a question around the mentor’s experience, in order to determine if that mentor would be the best match them.

Request

Once a mentee is satisfied that they have found an appropriate mentor they can send a mentoring request. It’s a good idea to use the edit function to add in a little bit more detail around what type of support is required.

The mentor will be sent an email alert asking them to review the mentoring request and to respond by either accepting it or declining. Mentors can use our messaging function to contact the mentee prior to accepting if they feel they need to clarify anything before making their decision. If a mentor does decline, the mentee is informed and can choose an alternative mentor to send a mentoring request to.

Arrange A Meeting

Once a mentor accepts a mentoring request the mentee is informed and at this point both the mentor and mentee can find each other’s contact details on the relationship dashboard. The mentee is asked to contact the mentor to arrange the first conversation.

If at any point either mentee or mentor decides they no longer wish to continue the relationship they can withdraw using the withdraw function under the details section of the relationship dashboard.

1^st Conversation Preparation

Once you have arranged your first conversation you can start to prepare for the meeting using some of our first conversation preparation tools. These are designed to help you get your mentoring relationship off to a great start. You can access these tools at any time under the Tools section of your relationship dashboard.

1^st Conversation and Smart Goal Setting

Embarking on a mentoring relationship without setting goals is rather like setting off on a journey without deciding where you are going, and just hoping you will get there. This is why we place quite a lot of emphasis on setting SMART goals at the outset of you mentoring relationship and we provide you with tools to help you do this.

Goal Progression

Once the goals have been set the main part of your mentoring journey will be to make progress towards achieving these goals, recording milestones along the way. This main part of your mentoring journey will differ for every participant, some may be quite short, others could go on for 12 months or more.

Built into the platform are number of guides and videos that outline techniques to help you keep your mentoring on track to ensure you achieve the goals you originally set

Completion

Once you feel you have achieved your goals, we provide some tips on how to bring your mentoring relationship to an end. You may then continue your relationship more informally or even set some new goals and start a new journey – it is entirely up to you.

New features

This month, we also have a couple of new features that are now available on the platform.

1. Exact matching: We have added an ‘Exact Matching’ feature to the ‘Find mentor’ screen of the mentoring platform. The default position is the” broad match” that we have always used, so at the top of the list are the mentors who most closely match the specified criteria but as you move down the list the mentors have some, but fewer of the specified matching criteria.  This new feature means that if a user clicks on ‘Exact Matching’ it allows them to select which search fields must match a client’s profile details. So for example, if a user selects the field ‘Region’ and picks 'North West’ only mentors with this Region are returned in the results. The rest of the search criteria will behave in the normal way, floating the mentors with the most matching items to the top.
    
2. Visits: On the admin dashboard you can now see a graph which plots out visits to your mentoring platform each month.

Happy Mentoring!