Category Archives: Insights

The Age Divide: Why mentoring is key to retaining and supporting older workers

The Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) and the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) have released their fifth report on the employment climate for older workers in Australia. According to the report, older workers aged 55 and above account for almost a fifth (20%) of the Australian workforce, but they only make up 4% of the […]

Why Mentoring Programs are Essential for Healthcare Providers

Many healthcare providers and professional bodies know that mentoring would greatly benefit their employees or members. But few actually offer a mentoring program and even fewer make available a well-designed and properly resourced program. Findings from study after study show that more people want mentoring than can access it. In healthcare, it’s no different. In […]

Why Mentoring is Important for All Professional Associations

These days, doctors, attorneys, and accountants are not the only people that call themselves “professionals”. Belonging to an association community helps develop individual professional identity and confidence. Mentoring programs don’t just help members achieve career and professional development goals. Mentors and mentees extend their professional networks, socialize professional standards and norms and increase their sense […]

Powerful Metrics to Build Your Business Case for Mentoring

Need some stats on mentoring to build your business case? Getting a mentoring program approved can take some persuasion, especially if the decision-makers have not had the experience of being in a well-designed program. Here are some useful statistics to help you build your business plan and develop a strong case. Incidence of mentoring A […]

Making Reverse Mentoring Work

Guest Blog Making Reverse Mentoring Work: Practical Guidelines for Programmes Reverse mentoring (or mentoring up) is a practical way to enable senior people in organizations to learn from more junior colleagues. There are two main contexts for this: technical and diversity-focused. Technical reverse mentoring emerged in the 1990s as a means of helping executives keep […]

Need Leadership? Teach your Managers to Mentor

Gartner reported in 2019 [1] that building leadership bench strength was a major priority for 67% of Heads of Human Resources and 78% of talent management leaders globally. As the global pandemic took hold in 2020, leaders were really put to the test and many were found wanting. A lesson was learned that people need […]

Reflecting on 25 years of mentoring

Setting up my first mentoring program was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would lead to a complete change of career for me, to something I’ve made my life’s work and about which I care tremendously. It was 1997. Back then, there were hardly […]

The Mentor’s Guide Book Review

The Mentor’s Guide was always an exceptional book. In this third edition, just released, Lois Zachary has been joined by her talented and dynamic daughter, Lisa Fain, CEO of Center for Mentoring Excellence. The book reflects a modern model of mentoring, grounded in adult learning theory, as a self-directed multidimensional relationship of mutual exchange. The […]

Mentoring in the Public Sector

Many of the studies on mentoring have been conducted in the educational, arts or corporate sectors. There is far less research on government mentoring. So, what do we know about what makes public sector mentoring different? Is it different? To some degree, the same individual and organizational benefits derive from mentoring, no matter the sector. […]

Why mentoring programs derail (and what to do about it)

In 2016, 2017 and again in 2022, we surveyed organisations and found that only just over half were actually satisfied with the results being delivered by their mentoring programs. An analysis comparing those that were satisfied (leaders), with those that were not (laggards), revealed once again in 2022 that lack of program success is highly […]