Techno-Power Your Mentoring Program

By Margery Weinstein Corporate mentoring programs can require a significant amount of time to manage, but with the help of technology, administration burdens can be reduced to an easily managed level, says Beth N. Carvin, CEO and president of Nobscot Corporation, a seller of mentoring technology under its Mentor Scout division. Carvin says to consider using technology for your mentoring program in the following situations:

1. If you plan to grow your program to 100 or more participants. For programs with fewer than 100 participants, you can use a spreadsheet or homegrown database to track and match your mentors and mentees. Once a mentoring program grows to more than 100 participants it becomes unwieldy, time consuming, and difficult to manage without technology.
2. For participant-driven programs. Academic research has shown that the more the mentees are involved with the selection of their mentor, the better the outcome of the mentorship. Technology allows participants to complete profiles and search for and match themselves with appropriate mentors or mentees.
3. When tracking and reporting is important. Mentoring technology can automatically track participants, mentorships, communication, goals, demographics, and other measures of your mentoring program. If you plan to report to senior management on the success of your mentoring program, then look for mentoring technology with strong reporting capabilities.
4. With multiple mentoring programs. Often, organizations have more than one mentoring program each designed to meet a different objective. Mentoring technology will ease the burden if you plan on managing separate mentoring programs for your high potentials, diversity groups, new hires, and everyone else. Without technology, you’ll likely have to devote one or more full-time employees to manage these programs. With technology, you can reduce the administration to a portion of the responsibilities of one or two employees in the HR or training departments.
5. For both one-to-one mentoring and group mentoring. Group mentoring is often the solution when you have a limited pool of mentors. Newer mentoring technology includes support for both one-to-one mentor/mentee relationships and many-to-many group mentoring.

When selecting mentoring technology, remember the KISS ("Keep It Simple, Stupid") philosophy. Look for a program that is simple to use for both your participants and your administrators. The program should allow for flexible profiles and good search functionality. Top it off with a provider that is knowledgeable both in mentoring and technology, offers a highly secure platform, and provides the program for a reasonable price. HAVE INPUT OR TIPS on this topic? If so, send them our way in an e-mail to lorri@trainingmag.com with the subject line "Mentoring," and we'll try to include your advice in an upcoming issue of the Training Tech Talk e-newsletter..