12 Jan 23 National Mentoring Month 2023

Mentoring can have a significant impact on a person’s skills and growth, and at sfG MentorNet we are excited to commemorate this years National Mentoring Month by sharing relevant articles and posts with our customers and followers. 

The goal of National Mentoring Month is to raise awareness about the importance of mentoring while also encouraging organisations to create and facilitate mentoring opportunities. 

If you would like to share a mentoring story with our audience, please contact the sfG MentorNet team, who would be delighted to hear from you and discuss guest blogging opportunities. 

Why Become A Mentor?

There would be no mentoring if mentors did not exist. Isn’t that a thought! 

We recently published a blog post about why mentors are important and what they bring to a mentoring relationship. 

Becoming a mentor is an excellent opportunity for ongoing personal development. A mentor can expect to learn and grow in their personal and business areas as the guide within the mentoring relationship. 

Mentorship can be extremely rewarding and can aid in the maintenance of confidence and self-belief. In the workplace, for example, being asked to mentor a new employee can provide the mentor with a sense of belonging and respect. 

Not only this, but mentors are 6x more likely to be promoted, in comparison to their non-mentor co-workers.

Why Get Involved In National Mentoring Month?

At its core, National Mentoring Month is an opportunity for businesses, non-profit organisations, and educational institutions to come together and consider how teams can work collaboratively to help individuals and groups meet goals through support and guidance provided by mentoring opportunities. 

Mentoring has numerous advantages and uses, including onboarding, talent development, and confidence building. On our website, you can read our blog about the benefits of mentoring. 

If you’ve been thinking about getting involved in mentoring in any capacity, now is the perfect time to learn more and take your first steps. 

sfG MentorNet And Mentoring 

Our sfG MentorNet online mentoring platform was developed in partnership with the Day 1 charity, who were looking for ways to improve and facilitate their mentoring programme provision. 

We developed an online platform, accessible via a unique URL – for them to manage the majority of their mentoring administration and communication in one location. 

Now, we are extremely grateful to be working with organisations all over the world. It truly never gets old, learning about our customers’ mentoring goals and programmes! Each programme we are introduced to is unique in terms of aims, management and team. 

On our case study page, you can read about some of our customers‘ mentoring programmes, including development, pain points, and how they were resolved. 

We look forward to sharing customer case studies on our Twitter and LinkedIn throughout the month to honour #NationalMentoringMonth – At sfG MentorNet, we aim to be a knowledge hub for anyone in the mentoring environment, in addition to providing a fantastic service to our mentoring platform clients.

Creating A Mentoring Programme

Making the decision to create a mentoring programme is certainly an exciting time. When doing so, the first step is to determine the goals of your mentoring programme – what problem are you hoping to solve for your mentees? 

The provision will be affected by the size of your mentoring programme. A less formal approach or the use of spreadsheets may work well for some smaller programmes, but for other programmes that are on a larger scale, a more formal approach, with the assistance of a mentoring platform, may be best.

Our mentoring resources page contains information on how to start a mentoring programme. The sfG MentorNet team are also always happy to hear your initial thoughts on mentoring programme development and advise you on how we might be able to help.

Becoming A Mentor

So you’ve done your research on mentoring and want to get involved by becoming a mentor – now, how do you find  mentor opportunities? 

To begin, you could inquire as to whether your workplace has a mentoring programme; if not, perhaps you could arrange a meeting with senior staff members to develop one? 

There may also be industry-specific mentoring programmes available, so look online for any industry leads who may need assistance. 

Local universities, schools, or colleges may also have mentoring opportunities for young people; contact them for information on how to apply.

Summary And Final Thoughts

We personally like to bring awareness to mentoring, through our own channels, as much as we can throughout the year. The amazing thing about special days dedicated to mentoring, such as National Mentoring Month, is that we get to easily read and stay up to date with other mentoring news that we may ordinarily not be aware of – by the use of hash-tagging.

If you are interested in mentoring, we highly recommend you getting involved in this special month, by way of sharing relevant news articles or posts, or reaching out to collaborate with others within the mentoring industry. (Like ourselves, at sfG MentorNet!)

We are looking forward to following all of your #NationalMentoringMonth posts this January, and supporting the mentoring community by engaging and sharing your related posts.

If you would like to arrange a free demonstration of our online mentoring platform, please reach out to the team – we would be delighted to hear from you.