Following through on your mentoring session
Featured in the Proactive Interviewee Skills training manual
By Beverley Williams
Category: Recruitment, Selection and Induction
Credit price: 3 download credits (Single user)
Although many mentoring sessions will result in short-term action plans, it is important to remember that mentoring is a long-term process designed to help the mentee to develop over a period of time. The mentee can benefit from reviewing the issues covered during the mentoring session as an ongoing and reflective process. Recording their findings throughout the entire mentoring period will help them to monitor their own development and to spot consistently recurring problem areas. The mentee’s journal can be constructed to allow them to retain as much privacy as they wish, while at the same time enabling them to discuss relevant parts of their journal with their mentor.
You open the training activity by inviting ideas on what the participants see as the key points about mentoring, ensuring that the point that mentoring is a long-term development process is brought out. You then introduce the participants to the concept of keeping a mentoring review journal, discussing the benefits of doing this and giving practical tips on how to get the best from it. Using their own notes from their last mentoring session, the participants work individually and privately to complete their first journal entry. You reconvene the group and lead a plenary discussion on the work they have done, making it clear that privacy is respected. You then introduce the participants to a systematic method of reviewing the review journal on a quarterly basis to ensure that they maintain a long-term overview of their own progress. The participants do some practical work using this method. You take one or two key learning points from each participant before distributing and commenting on a key learning points handout where appropriate.
Who is it for: This training resource is intended for use by trainers to encourage mentees to keep a journal where they examine issues and progress after each mentoring session, so providing themselves with a personal record of their progress.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 10 |
| Typical Duration: | 01:45:00 |
| No of Pages: | 12 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Additional resources: A4 ringbinders with A4 punched paper, Hole punch.
Purpose: This training resource is intended for use by trainers with participants who are currently being formally mentored. Ideally, this training activity should take place shortly after the initial mentoring session but it can usefully be run even if mentoring is already underway. You may want to run this training activity with small groups of three or four as the participants need to have attended their mentoring session within the last week or so. Arrangements are more difficult for a larger group. It is an excellent idea to run your mentors through this training activity to keep them fully up to date with the messages the mentees will be receiving. Participants will ideally have already covered the activities, ‘Preparing for your mentoring session’, and ‘Making the most of your mentoring session’.
Download the training activity, Following through on your mentoring session as featured in the Fenman training manual; Proactive Interviewee Skills