Workplace Mentoring

Workplace Mentoring– Mentoring – the presence of caring individuals who, along with parents or guardians, provide young people with support, counsel, friendship, reinforcement and a constructive example – is a strategy that can help young people of all circumstances to achieve.

Throughout history, older people have been mentors to young people, mostly through informal, spontaneous arrangements. According to the July-August 1978 Harvard Business Review article Everyone Who Makes It Has a Mentor, mentoring has always been an integral part of the career advancement of the business executive. Today, mentoring is emerging as a formal process to assist young people, often used in conjunction with existing development programs involving education, job training or life skills.

Workplace mentoring:

• Offers young people the chance to develop a relationship with one or more employees who become friends, role models and advocates for them.
• Typically takes place at the workplace, either during or after school hours.
• Can take several forms, including tutoring, job shadowing, career exploration and game playing.
• Typically asks the mentor for a commitment of at least one year.

Development of an Operations Manual: The Operations Manual is based on the ten Recommended Best Practices for Mentor Programs (QAS) for Youth Mentoring Programs. Experienced program managers understand that the Recommended Best Practices for Mentor Programs are vital in creating safe and effective programs. Essentially a framework for best practices, these standards is also recognized as a valuable tool for promoting mentee safety and personal growth.

When first learning how to develop a mentoring program, it 342 takes new program managers a long time to understand how utilize the standards. It’s our belief that their use can be simplified if program managers develop an operations manual as described below. Remember, the primary uses of an operations manual are A) to develop strategies to be used in running the mentoring program, and B) to chronicle the development of operational procedures so that they can be passed on to subsequent program staff.

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