How to Start a Mentoring Program

The starting point for any mentoring program template begins with two important questions:

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. Some of the perks of creating mentoring objectives include providing direction to program participants, establishing program key performance indicators (KPIs) and helping organizational leaders understand why they should offer their support

Successful mentorship programs offer both structure and flexibility. Structure provides participants a mentoring workflow to follow. This is critical to helping participants achieve productive learning that reaches defined mentorship goals. Similarly, flexibility is essential to support varying individual mentoring needs across specific learning goals, preferences, and learning style.

Key mentoring program design decisions include:

• Enrollment – is it open, application, or invite only?
• Mentoring style – can be traditional, flash, reverse
• Connection type – possibly 1:1, mentor groups, or one to many
• Connection duration – can be weeks or months — or perhaps even just a single session
• Measurement – tracking and reporting needs.

A good idea is to create a program workflow diagram to explain each step of your mentoring 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 of program size, easy-to-use mentoring software can help get your mentorship program started and running smoothly.