Tell participants what to do for speed mentoring

Either in your notification email to participants, or in a separate email, you should remind participants what they need to do as part of the speed mentoring part of the programme.

You will have already decided how you want speed mentoring to work when you designed your programme earlier.

Set a time limit

You should set a time limit for how long participants have to arrange and undertake their speed mentoring sessions. This time limit should be sufficiently long to accommodate busy diaries of participants, but not so long that people forget to do it. Setting a time limit also means you can plan ahead for the next stage of mentoring, where mentees select a long-term mentor.

Case study

Civil Service LGBT+ mentoring programme

For the Civil Service LGBT+ mentoring programme, each mentee was matched with up to 3 mentors for speed mentoring. In the notification emails, mentees were given a biography and contact details for each participant. They were also given instructions for what to do next as part of speed mentoring.

The email told mentees that they should contact their mentors proactively. The mentees were asked to set up a 30 minute speed mentoring session with each of the mentors they were matched with. They were told to set up this session within the 4 weeks of receiving the email.

Mentees were told that they could either use this speed mentoring session to:

1. get a one-off piece of guidance or advice from each mentor, or
2. explore whether each of their mentors were suitable matches for a longer-term mentoring arrangement