Does Your Company Culture Need a Mentorship Program

Does Your Company Culture Need a Mentorship ProgramCould your company culture benefit from mentorship? A great mentorship program might just be what your company needs in order to improve employee engagement. It will foster a company environment of learning and professional development, while allowing your workers to bond and help each other. It could be just what your corporate culture needs to keep great people within the organization instead of spending their off hours working on their video resume. Why start a mentorship program?So just why should you start a mentorship program? The biggest reason is to keep talent on the inside of your company. By embracing mentors, your company is expressing an interest in the professional development of your employees.You dont just want anyone in your organization, you want employees who want to learn, grow in their roles, and pass on their knowledge. This will help identify your company culture as a distributionspolitik where employees can le arn new skills while simultaneously forming connections with their coworkers and superiors.Plus a mentorship program could be just the thing you need to attract the great Millennial candidates your company needs. Surveys have shown 75 percent of Millennial employees seek mentors in their working life. A further 89 percent seek some variety of professional development on the job. If your company has a well-oiled mentorship program, interested Millennial candidates might be more likely to consider your company during their job search.Make your program a recognizable part of your company culture and brand.If you want candidates to associate your corporate culture with your mentorship program then youll need to make this program a strong aspect of your employer brand. Use your company career page and social media channels to get the word out about your mentorship program. Dont make this program merely a hidden gem of your company culture. Instead, put it on display.Maybe include testimo nials from employees and mentors about their experiences in the program. You could even record a recruitment video to put up on your career site with your mentorship program as the star. The most important aspect is to make sure this program is a recognizable part of your company culture and employer brand. This will help your organization attract the top-tier candidates you need.Match up compatible employeesAn important aspect of your program should be to make sure mentors and proteges are matched up based on compatibility. If you match up incompatible employees its likely youll be dealing with more fights than professional development.You might want to develop a metric to gauge the personality and skills of employees before matching them up for a mentorship relationship. You can even let employees pick their own mentors and proteges to ensure the workers sharing knowledge will mesh well.Incentivize the program for your mentorsIts pretty obvious why employees would want to be mento red, especially entry-level and Millennial employees. Mentorship provides the opportunities for growth, networking and learning these employees might otherwise elend have come across outside your corporate culture. But whats in it for the mentors?You should spend some time considering this before starting your program. Think about what will make mentors consider joining the program and sharing their skills with the next generation of employees. This could be something as simple as a special lunch for the mentors to something more performance-based like mentioning their mentor duties on an annual review. Whatever you decide, make sure its a corporate culture perk your mentors will enjoy.A good mentorship program can really improve your company culture and help your organization develop the next generation of talent. If you can provide opportunities for learning and growth, great employees will be more likely to stay within your company and eventually take on leadership responsibiliti es.What are some ways you can use a mentorship program to improve your corporate culture? Share in the commentsIMAGE Courtesy of Flickr by Anuraj Singh.

Teen unemployment hits new high Where are all the careers advisers

Teen unemployment hits new high Where are all the careers advisers Teenage unemployment hits new high Where are all the careers advisers?Posted March 26, 2015, by Marni Williams One in five unemployed Australians is a teenager. So who is responsible for guiding them into work? Australias youth jobless rate reached its highest peak since 1998 last month, with 14.2 per cent of 15-24 year olds looking for work. While we may not have reached the figures being experienced in Greece or Spain just yet, research released this week by the Career Industry Council of Australia (CICA) and McCrindle should be cause for concern it shows that in-school careers practitioners are considerably underfunded and time poor. When you consider the situation for careers advisers alongside the federal governments decision to discontinue funding for careers websites myfuture and the National Job Guide, its no wonder 15-19 year olds are struggling to find a sense of direction. It would seem too many students ar e left to make these important life choices on their own. So where are all the careers advisers? The CICA and McCrindle research have revealed that over half of all career practitioners are working part-time in their roles, and that just 1 in 3 are able to devote the entirety of their time to career education and guidance. Lack of hilfestellung is a concern shared by careers adviser Penny Morrison, who sees the impact of reduced funding first-hand It mostly boils down to having the time to put the ideas into practice. If you have an innovative idea, you cant just run with it. You need to get someone to replace you for the day. Image courtesy of McCrindle and CICA There has been valid concern amongst the VET and tertiary education sectors lately about disreputable training organisations signing up students with little or no regard for their educational outcomes. One of the most important roles of careers advisers is to point students in the direction of appropriate courses that will get them into jobs that are in demand, and Penny says shes concerned that student resources arent being supported Theres a big problem with the reliability of resources. Careers advisers dont have the time to validate all the information that comes to them. If there arent free, impartial resources for the students to get an idea of the career paths that are out there then some of the limited discretionary funding we have to go into purchasing those resources and less will go into programs to get them into jobs. Penny cites the success of a