Running Effective Mentoring Programmes

Empower mentoring journeys from strategy to impact

Is your mentoring programme not delivering the results you were expecting? Are you planning to run a new mentoring programme? Design, promote and implement an effective mentoring programme that brings results to your organisation.

When done right, mentoring can transform people, organisations, and communities for the better, yet many structured mentoring programmes achieve sub-par results because their planning and execution does not draw on best practice. Often, they start off strong but then slowly fizzle out, and other times, they don’t even take off.

The challenges in running and managing a mentoring programme are at various levels:

Recruiting the right mentors for your programme and get them excited about it
Getting entrepreneurs to understand the value of mentoring and engaging effectively with mentors
Knowing how to match mentors and mentees
Understanding the types of support to provide to mentors and mentees at the start and on an ongoing basis to enable them to build robust mentoring relationships
Evaluating the success of your mentoring programme (or even set up metrics of success)

With more than 15 years experience in designing and implementing mentoring programmes, we are very well aware of the common pitfalls and this is why we have designed this course.

Whether you are setting up a new mentoring programme for the first time, or currently running one that is not achieving the results you were expecting, our course will enable you to understand what you need to do to ensure your mentoring programme is set up for success.

By the end of the course, you will have designed a mentoring programme fit to your organisation with the support of our team and your cohort peers.

“I gained a deeper understanding of what mentoring is despite doing it for years. Anyone intending to run a mentoring programme should sign up for this course.”

HiiL Innovation Hub – East Africa

Eric Mwangi Kariuki

“I wouldn’t have thought that The Human Edge (formerly Mowgli Mentoring) REMP training would bring us so quickly to a solid draft of our own mentoring programme!”

EuroNatur

Leonie Kraut

About the 'Running Effective Mentoring Programmes' course

5 facilitated live sessions with a cohort of peers (2 -3 hours per session)

1 individual coaching session to discuss your implementation plans.

Peer-work groups and feedback on your mentoring programme design

2 post-training peer exchange and learning sessions

Certificate at the end of the programme

Who is this course for?

This course is for anyone who wants to...

Set up a mentoring programme within their organisation for the first time
Improve an ongoing mentoring programme
Reach and get the interest of the right mentors for their progamme
Hook and motivate their participants to make the most from the programme
Match and support their mentors and mentees for the greater success
Understand the level of support needed after matching
Share their experience, reflective practices learning and get feedback from like-minded peers

Course Curriculum

(Live Session)

Module 1.

Understanding Mentoring and the Purpose of Your Mentoring Programmes

In this first module you explore what mentoring is and isnt (as there can be many different interpretations), its value, and the role of and benefits to mentors and mentees. Gaining inspiration from other mentoring programmes and cohort participants, you will also start to reflect on and articulate the objectives of your mentoring programme. This is important as all the other design components of the mentoring programme are layers on to why you are running mentoring and what outcomes you are trying to achieve for those involved in the mentoring programme. You will have the opportunity to work with our experienced facilitators and in small groups with other cohort members.

Module 2.

Designing Mentoring Programmes Fundmentals

Mentoring programmes come in all shapes and sizes but there are certain characteristics all effective mentoring programmes have in common. In this module you will deep dive into different mentoring programme design options from standard 1:1 mentoring, peer mentoring, group mentoring, reverse mentoring. You will further understand what you want to achieve with your mentoring programme, and explore the evidence base around what characteristics make a mentoring programme effective.

Module 3.

Promoting & Recruiting

What is the profile of the “ideal” mentor and how can you attract and interest these ideal mentors? How do you build interest within your target mentees, increase their mentorability, and get them motivated and committed to the programmes? In this module you will start to design your own recruitment campaign and how you can engage and select the right people into the programme. Exploring people’s interest, commitment and motivations, and being selective, is an important first step as not everyone is ready to benefit equally from mentoring.

Module 4.

Preparing & Matching

The evidence shows that when mentors are trained and mentees are well prepared mentoring programmes have a much higher chance of being effective. In this module you will explore how you might prepare your mentors and mentees for their relationships. You will also explore the different ways to match mentors and mentees and what may work best for your programme. While this module will not prepare you to rigorously train your mentors, it will help you to think through the content of the training, and who you might engage with to train your mentors.

Module 5.

Supporting, Guiding, Troubleshooting and Measuring Impact

Effective mentoring programmes rely on strong relationships between mentors and mentees. But these relationships do not always happen organically in structured mentoring programmes. The programme must support and enable mentors and mentees to build these relationships at the same time as focussing on the desired outcomes for the programmes. How can you do this? In this module we also explore what how you may measure the impact of your programme and what data you will need to capture as you go along to understand the impact off the programme.

Module 6.

Learning, Embedding and Adapting Your Programme

This final module helps you to consolidate the lessons learnt throughout the programme and finalise the design of your mentoring programme. We will explore what you can do to embed your mentoring programme into your organisation or network to ensure its sustainability and build mentoring cultures. After you have run your mentoring programme, and gathered data, how will you measure its impact and use this to feed in to future mentoring programmes. How you can use this learning to modify and adapt future programmes?

”This was an eye-opening experience into the thought process behind creating the right circumstances for delivering meaningful mentoring programmes within one’s workplace and beyond!”

Nature Trust, FEE Malta

James Gabarretta

”This programme is absolutely ground breaking and a must attend if you want to design a robust mentoring programme”

Sinapis Kenya

Martin Kibisu

Pricing

Are you ready to learn how to set up an effective mentoring programme?Join our the next cohort now!

We want to make effective mentoring available to all, and have adjusted our pricing structure accordingly for you to be able to attend the Running Effective Mentoring Programmes (REMP) course.

Full price: GBP 1,100 
Subsidised rate (2023 only) for ESOs* based in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana: GBP 200
Subsidised rate (2023 only) for ESOs* based in the Global South (including SSA, MENA, LATAM countries and Asia. Check out full list here) GBP 300

50% additional discount for additional participants/colleagues from the same organisation who sign up at the same time. We believe that the mentoring programme is more likely to be embedded in an organisation if more than one person from that organisation participates in the course.

Register for the next Cohort

*ESOs: Entrepreneurship Support Organisations that support, train, provide mentoring and sometimes fund entrepreneurs. They may be independent companies, for- and not-for-profit, and may be based in local universities or government agencies.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the required commitment?

5 facilitated live sessions (2 to 3 hours each)
1 individual coaching session to discuss your implementation plans.
2 post-training peer exchange and learning sessions
30 minutes preparation work before each live session
40 minutes reflection time after each live session

How do I enroll to the programme?

Click on the button “BOOK MY SEAT NOW” and proceed to pay by credit card. If you’d rather have an invoice, contact us at hello@humanedge.org.uk. You can also contact us at hello@humanedge.org.uk if you have any question or see how this course can fit your needs.

Who should attend the programme?

The person who will lead your mentoring programme within your organisation. Generally it would be a person who is used to working with different stakeholders, is able to advocate for mentoring, and who has good project management and people skills

Can I earn a certificate?

Yes, you will receive a certificate at the end of the programme.

Note that the certificate will be given upon attendance of a minimum of 4 live sessions and 1 follow up session.

What language will the course be facilitated in?

The course will be delivered and facilitated in English and it is required that all participants are able to converse fluently in English. We will be looking to run these courses in other languages in the future!