5 Steps to Upskill Employees with Your Mentoring Program

As a manager, one of the most important tasks you have is to ensure that your employees are always growing and improving their skills. A mentoring program can be a powerful tool in this regard, as it provides employees with opportunities to learn from experienced and knowledgeable professionals within your organization. By developing a strong mentoring program, you can help employees expand their skill sets, improve their performance, and build stronger relationships with their colleagues.

Step 1: Identify the Skills and Areas for Improvement

The first step in developing a mentoring program is to identify the areas in which your employees need the most help. This may involve conducting a survey or holding focus groups to get a sense of the common challenges that employees face. You should also consider the skills and areas of expertise that are most critical to your organization's success, and make sure that those areas are included in your mentoring program.

Step 2: Match Mentors and Mentees

Once you have identified the skills and areas for improvement, you can start matching mentors and mentees. This process can involve a variety of factors, including the mentor's area of expertise, their level of experience, and their availability. You may also consider the mentee's goals and career aspirations when making these matches.

Books can and have been written on how to do this right, but for our purposes here the important thing to match with skill transfer in mind.

Step 3: Develop a Clear Plan

Once you have matched mentors and mentees, it's important to develop a clear plan for how the mentoring relationship will work. This plan should include goals and objectives for both the mentor and the mentee, as well as a timeline for when certain skills or areas of improvement should be achieved. You should also establish clear lines of communication between the mentor and the mentee, so that they can stay on track and make adjustments as needed.

You wants mentoring relationships to grow organically and take on a life of their own. Too much Admin Control can stifle the experience. But no control whatsoever doesn't achieve the company's goals. Find a middle ground. Often distributing checklist to mentors of things you want covered is enough to steer the ship in the right direction.

Step 4: Provide Support and Resources

To ensure that your mentoring program is successful, it's important to provide support and resources to both mentors and mentees. This may involve offering training sessions or workshops to help mentors develop their skills as teachers, as well as providing mentees with access to online resources and tools that can help them learn and grow. You should also make sure that you have a system in place for tracking progress and addressing any challenges that arise during the mentoring relationship.

Step 5: Evaluate and Refine Your Program

Finally, it's important to evaluate your mentoring program on a regular basis to ensure that it is achieving its goals and making a positive impact on your employees. You should gather feedback from both mentors and mentees, as well as from managers and other stakeholders within your organization. Based on this feedback, you should refine and adjust your program as needed to ensure that it remains effective and relevant to the needs of your employees.

Don't put this off until the very end. Doing exit surveys at the end of the program is too late. You can't fix or course correct if the program has concluded. Collect feedback weekly and monitor it. This way you can catch bugs, upsets, slows or anything non-optimum and address them before they become a bigger issue.

Mentor Resources can help any company or government agency to leverage technology to create tailored career development programs that are cost-effective. Our mentoring software - Wisdom Share is a cloud-based program that is simple and comes with guided workflows. Included are tools for administrators to attract, enroll, connect, and guide participants. We also provide analytics to ensure you can monitor your employee development program and easily see ROI metrics.

Reach out to us today for a Free Demonstration of our software.