While there is extensive evidence of the benefits of mentoring relationships for mentees and mentors, there is less research evidence on what it means to design and manage a successful mentoring scheme. This is despite widespread recognition that there are an increasing number of mentoring schemes being developed in diverse sectors, from the arts to youth services, professional associations to social justice and across all education levels.

A new release of sfG MentorNet was made available in November 2019. The main focus of the release was making matching administration easier and making it easy to encourage mentors and mentees to complete evaluation questionnaires. Already the improvements to the matching administration have produced tangible results – Anna Klenert from Oxford Brookes University said of the new release: “The new features helped tremendously. The matching time has reduced from approximately 4 days to 2 days.”

You may have already put together a mentoring programme and want to improve on it, or you may be considering your first scheme altogether. Either way, drawing on experience from ‘people who have done it before’ can give you the best chances of a well-designed…

The University of Oxford has been running mentoring schemes for a while now, but recently has decided to select sfG MentorNet as the mentoring platform for some of its mentoring programmes. We are very pleased to be working with the University, to enhance their mentoring…

I read a recent article in the Drum, about a business leader’s enthusiasm for mentoring as a general practice throughout the working life – and even personal life. Many of us don’t always appreciate the value of personal development – in the real sense of…

When writing another blog, I had a general conversation with Jo Haddrick from Napier University about the role of mentoring in preparing students for the business world. We discussed the challenges faced by students in learning how to operate in a corporate environment and having…

Jo Haddrick is Mentoring Coordinator within the Employer Opportunities Team at Edinburgh Napier University. The department has been running a mentoring programme for 9 years and they are currently in the process of moving to an online mentoring platform, sfG MentorNet. Following a conversation with…

One of sfG MentorNet’s customers uses MentorNet in an international development environment and recently wrote an article on the challenges of project management in this space and of the benefits of a mentoring scheme that has been set up to help support international development around…

MentorNet has been established for some years now, which gives the infrastructure stability, but also meant we needed to refresh the look and feel, whilst maintaining the intuitive way of working that you are used to. Here is an overview of some of the new…

Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU) is the representative body of all 20,000 students within the University of Cambridge and is a registered charity. It aims to support and advance the opportunities of its members, from all walks of life. A key goal is to widen…