If you haven’t yet given mentoring a chance, you could be missing out on opportunities of elevating your workforce.  Talent and career mentoring program can increase employee retention and engagement significantly. This program comprises of many elements of regular mentoring along with some qualities of mentoring for leadership development.

When organizations enable employee development through career and talent mentoring, it brings about the following benefits:

• Better employee retention 
• Self-driven employee development 
• A great company culture 

Not all talent and career mentoring programs are equal. Employees have different goals which is why each organization has to adhere to some best practices for creating an optimal program. So what must be your approach to mentoring for a healthy company culture?

Here’s everything you must know to create a career mentoring program for your employees:

Let the Participants Know

This program must be inclusive and it must involve all employees. Now the question is who to involve and how to invite the right candidates? Use the help of your marketing team to let all employees in the organization know they can enroll in an on-going talent and career mentoring program. 

Match by Career Level

The mentor must be at least one career level higher than its mentees. This way, the mentor will be in a better position to give advice and discuss career options. 

In case the mentees want horizontal mobility into different departments within the organization, make mentor matches based on that departmental basis. This will help them expand skill sets and open new doors into different careers.

Define the Role of the Mentor

Just like the role of a mentor is defined in mentoring for healthy company culture, their role in career development must be defined as well.

A mentor can help his mentee in different ways starting from overcoming challenges in the said role, networking, adopting a new career path, creating career goals, and more. It’s best to develop mentor training to prepare the mentors for this mentorship early. With this help, mentors will be able to prepare for their role in advance and help the mentees with career development in the best possible way.

Create Career Goals 

It’s better to document the career goals so that the progress can be tracked. These goals must be SMART. Mentors must practice reverse mentoring to develop a friendly relationship with their mentees.In the mentor training sessions, cover the goal-setting segment. Using a mentoring software here will help track goals and check the progress of each mentee. This will make it easier to access the ROI of the talent and career mentoring program.

Encourage Transparency

Organizational communication must not stop with participants enrolled in the mentoring program. In fact, managers should do extra effort to stay informed with the developmental progress of their employees. Everyone will hence be on the same page and a congruence will be created within the organization.

Measure the Success

Last but least, run reports to identify which participants changed their job roles. This will be an indicator of the success of the talent and career mentoring program. These reports can be extracted from reliable mentoring software.