The team at Graduate Mentor have started running monthly learning and development sessions for our mentors so they can benefit from the wealth of experience of over 300 active mentors on the programme. The aim is to share advice from their experience which can then be passed on to mentees. We plan to cover all early talent and career-related advice. This month we chose to discuss resources and feedback. What follows is a summary of our discussion to enable all our mentors to use the advice in their own one-to-one mentoring sessions.
Resources
Along with our monthly discussions, we also have our Mentor WhatsApp Group. The purpose of creating this is to allow you, as mentors, to network, and discuss anything regarding your mentoring sessions, and any ideas that others may have. If you would like to join our WhatsApp group, please contact us and we will happily add you.
With that, there are a lot of useful resources being shared within this group, but what happens when the chat is active? The resources get lost within the group and become difficult to find. The resources that are shared within this group are not only useful to those in the group, but to all of our other mentors too! So we want to make that information accessible to all our mentors.
So what is next on our agenda? We will start collecting these resources and have them integrated into your mentor dashboard for easy access. As you may have seen already we have integrated visa information for you to read, in the event that your mentee is an international student looking for work in the UK. We have received great feedback on this and will look to build on this over time with more resources.
Feedback
Getting a great review on Google or Trustpilot can be very rewarding as a mentor, but is this enough to know that your mentees are getting the most out of their sessions with you?
A mentee might want feedback on their CV or their interview skills, but mentors are also looking for feedback on their mentoring! It was suggested in the webinar that it would be useful to have a feedback form about you for your mentee to fill out after a session.
As it is always important to want to improve yourself as a mentor, we will take this onboard and implement it within the platform. This feedback form may include; was the session useful, did the mentor listen to what you wanted to improve on and focus on that, did you like their mentoring style, etc. This will also be held within your dashboard, and you can then refer to this for any future sessions to give your mentees a rewarding experience.
Featured Mentors
Some mentors mentioned that they would like to see more appointments in their calendars, so we have implemented a new rotation of ‘Featured Mentors’. This means, for one week at a time, each mentor will have a dedicated link to their ‘Featured Mentor’ page to drive more mentees to book a session.
We will showcase five mentors as featured mentors each week, and promote their individual pages directly to our mentees. We will do this via email campaigns and social media promotion. We have seen great results from this already, so if your bookings are a little lower than expected and you would like to become a featured mentor for a week, please get in touch with our team to add you!
The team at Graduate Mentor are always looking to improve the platform, and with your feedback, this is possible! We take every suggestion onboard and try and implement it as best we can. We hold our L&D webinars on the first Friday of every month, which means the next one will be on the 14th April 2023. Join here!
