15 Jul 15 Demonstrating The Value of Mentoring Relationships – through Surveys
Building connections – be they in the educational, charity or business environment – can have a substantial impact on individuals. A recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development – in its 17th year of surveys, provides many insights into the area of Learning & Development. In one of its conclusions it says, “Networking can be one of the best ways of developing L&D capability – there is great value in building connections with those who can both share insight and challenge your thinking.” * This report is done primarily for business but regardless, it is a useful quote for those of you seeking to highlight the value of your mentoring programmes, as it comes out of the proof points in a survey.
Surveys are immensely valuable – they provide insights into what we are doing well and what needs improving. They can also help shape our decisions into which way to go in the future. And they can highlight to executive sponsors, or those providing funding, the value of what you are doing. In our latest release of MentorNet we have therefore included the ability for you to run your own surveys on your programmes. This will help give you that insight, but also help you prove to others the value of the programmes and any changes that need to be made. And you can now do it all within your mentoring environment, using the names, contacts and secure environment that you are used to.
New features: For those of you that are existing customers of MentorNet, here is a list of some of these new features that are in the latest release. As you know, we like having a personal relationship with you, our customers, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions:
Survey/Evaluation Module to Gain Insight into your Programme Effectiveness
- Create and run online surveys and define different questions and answer types
- Push surveys out to groups of users, such as all mentors, or all mentees in a specific sub-programme
- Evaluate a programme by running surveys at specific points such as at the start, middle and end and track the change in answers throughout
UI Refresh
- A newer, more modern looking interface makes the system more visually appealing for younger users and enables you to add a background image to the site
- Customise colours more closely to your brand, so users have the confidence of your charity or institution while using MentorNet
Flexible User Profiles
- Customise user profiles differently for mentors vs mentees with fields like “employer”, “job title”, etc for a mentor and for a mentee fields like “student id”, “course name”
- Customise user profiles for different mentoring sub-programmes. Makes it easier to administer multiple mentoring schemes within the one overall system. All user profile fields can be either public or private, allowing you to maintain strict confidentiality of personal data.
*CIPD Annual Survey Report 2015, p36, http://www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/learning-development_2015.pdf