sfG MentorNet were delighted to be a supporter of the AGCAS 2021 conference this summer. It was of course, as everything has been, a conference with a difference. Due to COVID, it was held virtually using an online event solution. The advantage meant they had…

The Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) is an international membership organisation, with 1500 members working in shared research facilities and laboratories at about 300 academic institutions around the world. Members come to ABRF with backgrounds in either scientific research or they are technologists working…

Cambridge SU is the representative body of all students within the University of Cambridge. A key goal is to widen the participation of students at Cambridge and to broaden the pool of potential applicants to the University and its Colleges, focusing on those from wider…

Highlighting the value of your mentoring schemes is difficult according to our report on mentoring schemes and their management and those we spoke to. Funders often want to see metrics for mentoring schemes, but this isn’t always the full picture, nor the only way to…

Brunel University London provides a series of high-quality programmes and activities that enhance the opportunities of students as part of their widening access scheme – focused on those groups that are under-represented in higher education. Amongst those activities is the Brunel Professional Mentoring Programme, which…

Kingston University’s Student Enrichment team runs various programmes and mentoring schemes to help enhance the experience and knowledge gained by students at Kingston University. Julia Millette manages the team that runs 2 mentoring schemes – firstly, a peer-to-peer mentoring scheme where 2nd year students mentor…

We are delighted to announce that we have a new mobile messaging app for our sfG MentorNet customers! Many people are used to messaging on their phone these days, so we were keen to develop an app to help them do so as part of…

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…