Step-by-step guide

Before you begin

Things you need to know and should consider before you start to create your mentoring programme.

This website contains step-by-step guides that explain how you can run your own mentoring programme.

These guides include additional resources, templates, tools and software to help you design and deliver your programme.

What this website can help you to do

It’s for HR teams and people running networks

This website might be useful for you if:

  • you work in an HR talent team, and want to set up mentoring across your organisation
  • you lead an employee or professional network, and want to set up a programme for members of your network

It’s not for individuals

We cannot help you find a mentor or a mentee directly. This website is not intended for individuals who are looking to start a mentoring relationship directly.

If you are an individual looking to start mentoring, you might find the model guidance for mentees and for mentors helpful for some pointers on how to make the most of your mentoring relationship.

It helps you to create large scale programmes

The guides, tools and resources on this website can help you to develop a large scale mentoring programme. By large scale, we mean programmes with hundreds of participants.

Whilst the approach, tools and resources on this website might could be used with smaller groups, the outcomes might be less reliable.

This is a supply and demand problem: the more people you have engaging in your programme, the easier it will be for the software we’ve developed to find suitable matches for your participants. The software technically works for small groups, but you’ll be less likely to achieve large numbers of matches.

It will create a two-stage programme

If you follow all of the guidance on this website, you will be creating a two-stage programme.

  1. The first stage uses categorical data from participants to create one or more coarse matches between mentors and mentees. Mentees and mentors use these matches to engage in speed mentoring.
  2. In the second stage, based on their speed mentoring sessions, mentees choose a mentor to start a long-term mentoring relationship with for the next 12 months.

You can, of course, adapt the structure if this doesn’t meet your needs. Further information on how you could adapt this structure is available in our Design your programme guidance.

Why we think this approach works

It’s based on a real programme

Everything on this website is based on the processes and tools that were developed as part of the Civil Service LGBT+ mentoring programme.

The Civil Service LGBT+ mentoring programme matched junior LGBT+ mentors with senior LGBT+ mentees inside UK Civil Service organisations. In its first two years, this programme supported more than 800 mentors and 1,150 mentees across 92 central government organisations. More than 2,250 mentoring matches were made as part of this programme, generating an estimated 6,000 hours of mentoring activity for participants.

Adapt the contents for your context

As this website is based on an existing Civil Service programme, the guides, templates, tools and software align to Civil Service terminology and concepts. You might need to adapt them to fit your own contexts.

Using this content

Content we’ve created

Most of the content of this website has been created by us directly; this includes:

  • written guidance
  • documents and templates
  • software

In most cases, the content is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International license. In most cases, you are free to use, share or adapt anything we’ve created provided that:

  1. you give the appropriate credit to us, by linking back to this website
  2. you do not use these resources for commercial purposes
  3. if you adapt the material in any way, you must apply the same conditions as apply to the source

Third party content

In some cases, we have built upon the work of others. Where we’ve used someone else’s work, we’ve done our best to give them the credit by linking to their work and providing appropriate licensing information.

If you think we’ve used your work and not given you appropriate credit, please raise an issue on GitHub.