The Role Of The Mentoring Co-Ordinator

The task of the mentoring co-ordinator can be quite formidable.

He or she is the formal link between participants and top management, the primary source of troubleshooting for relationships in difficulty, and the person responsible for all the support mechanisms. Key activities include:

• managing the publicity for the scheme and the recruitment of mentors and mentees

• arranging initial training and follow-up

• maintaining the website, where there is one

• administering the matching process and any reassignments that are needed

• ensuring that measurement and review processes take place when they are supposed to

• managing the budgets and quality control processes

• being the public face of the programme to audiences inside and outside the organisation.

One of the most common reasons mentoring programmes falter is that there is no one with the assigned time or priorities to devote to these activities. It is therefore imperative that before the company embarks on a major expansion of mentoring, it ensures that there is sufficient management resource to support it. A rough calculation is that it requires one full day a weekof an HR professional's time for every 20 mentoring pairs. Some companies with large graduate mentoring programmes ease the burden by assigning second-year graduate recruits to the HR department to absorb the bulkof the administrative burden. This is a prized assignment, as the graduate gets to know a very large slice of the organisation in the year or so he or she is attached to the project.