INTERNAL MENTORING

The problem with internal mentoring

In every organisation there is a likely to be a natural level of mentoring activity - experienced people offering to help less experienced people. More and more organisations, however, feel that this isn't enough to ensure that the people who need support get the support they need. These organisations seek to increase the level of mentoring activity and to control it so that it is applied effectively.

There are two typical problems with this:

• mentoring relationships work best when they evolve naturally - they are more fragile when they are engineered.



• effective mentoring requires a high level of skill - and most organisations don't have a large number of skilled mentors readily available.

How Learning Curve can help

Learning Curve has extensive experience of helping organisations to set up effective mentoring frameworks (the free paper Organising Mentoring Frameworks summarises this experience). We can help you to address the problems above in two ways:

Consultancy

We can help you to identify the market for mentoring and to understand the needs of this market. We can also help you to identify potential mentors and to establish the most effective way of organising, monitoring and supporting mentoring relationships.

Training

We can provide training to potential mentors which helps them to make decisions about what kind of mentoring they want to provide and to develop their skills as mentors.

Read an extract from our publication Effective Mentoring.