Mentoring programs are one of the chosen ways to accelerate employment engagement, employment growth, or culture building, but in recent year the use of startup accelerators and incubators growth to the point that it is now one of the top markets.
Mentoring provides a lot of benefits to mentors and mentees, and it shows in the stats where about 70% of Fortune 500 companies have a formal mentoring program.
Even if we show that a large percentage of companies manage mentoring programs, the problem lies in the difficulty of operating them.
Mentoring Software
Mentoring software helps organizations facilitate mentoring programs. This software allows program managers to effectively match mentors and mentees, scheduling session and tracking progress.
Mentoring software is a key requirement to run a efficient mentoring program
The main goal of mentoring software is to facilitate sharing the knowledge collected from a pool of mentors.
Running mentoring programs manually exposes many problems during the administration and operations of such programs using spreadsheets or other manual techniques. Mentoring software helps potentiate the programs' success by supporting a unified and more automated way of managing the programs. Includes track schedule, booking from a pool of mentors, see availability, many-to-many mentoring sessions, and tracking statistics.
How Does Mentoring Software Work for Startup programs?
Types of me software vary depending on the market they are trying to target. For example, the most popular is the company's internal mentoring programs; however, we have seen a growth in marketplaces offering mentoring to any interested. Team Coaches focus on supporting startups' creation, development, and scale for different purposes.
What we are looking for a mentoring software for startups:
- Manage the match-making
- User availability
- Book mentoring sessions
- Measure progress
- Report impact and success
As part of the startup growth process, mentoring allows you to have up-to-date information from your portfolio and validate the progress.
Step-by-step setup using Team Coaches
1. Create the program
In this program, you must define what are the key take-away from the program, mentors, and startup joining.
Understand what you will be monitoring and what engagement you are looking for.
2. Invite users to the program
Before inviting your mentees, the pool of mentors needs to be created, where you need to pre-create their profile with their experience, skills, interest, and areas they believe could be the best support to startups.
The next is to invite mentees or entrepreneurs to join the program, provide clear guidelines, and create their own profile and the skills they are looking for so the system can automatically recommend mentors.
3. Mentor matching
The mentoring software can make highly accurate matches by collecting data from mentors and mentees around skills, interests, strengths, weaknesses, experience, and goals.
This process using mentoring software will be done in minutes for an easy way to match mentors, coaches, entrepreneurs, and mentors.
As soon as the mentees finish making their profiles, the administrator will review recommended mentors for such mentee.
4. Mentor selection
Team Coaches does not automatically assign the mentees a mentor, gives recommendations,s and allow mentees to find mentors in a pool of available mentors, filtering them with skills.
It also allows coaches and admin to select recommended mentors for each startup.
For mentoring to be effective, the mentees or entrepreneurs need to make sure that they understand the objective of their mentoring sessions and be prepared when taking them.
5. First session
Coaches, program or portfolio managers in general, recommend and attend the first session to introduce the team to the new mentor, explaining ideas and objectives and validating that the matching works.
This session is booked using any of the virtual meeting software or it can be done in person all depending on the setup and needs from entrepreneurs and mentors.
6. Make a plan
After the first session and positive match, mentors and mentees can agree and set up recurrent meetings to meet regularly. All this is possible thanks to the capabilities of Team Coaches to sync up with your calendar and create recurrent meetings.
7. Report progress
Program managers can access reports and dashboards to track insightful data such as:
- how many sessions are booked
- how many sessions per startup
- how many tasks are created per meeting
This is key to a successful mentoring program at the end of the day.
