What is mentoring? 5 types that promote learning

Suppose you want to understand what is mentoring. In that case, you can start by seeing it as an effective e-learning and learning tool that motivates teams and helps retain talent in companies while improving their competitiveness. Knowing how to use it correctly is essential to become a real added value in your company. 

Having motivated and qualified teams is the best asset in an organization. Mentoring allows you to detect internal talent and create development opportunities for your collaborators in line with your company’s objectives.  

There are different types of mentoring that encourage learning and participation in the development of the trajectory of your teams we will tell you about. 

What is mentoring?

Mentoring is a two-way process whereby an experienced person teaches and guides another person in their personal or professional development in an evolving and long-term relationship. 

In turn, the mentor faces new challenges, different situations, and updates to adapt to the needs of their mentee.

Professional mentoring, thus, becomes an act of teaching to learn to the others, always in a constructive way, so that they can assimilate the information through different methodologies and approaches. 

The mentor must be assertive and respectful, just as the mentee must be open to change and explore new options. 

In an organization, mentoring is one of the elements that best integrates into continuous training models and takes an active part in the professional and psychosocial development of the company. 

You can use it to: 

• Encourage your teams to become familiar with new tasks by increasing their specialization. 
• Encourage flexibility and adaptability at work. 
• Promote the professional career plan of your employees. 

At the end of the day, betting on developing mentoring programs enhances your human capital. 

Benefits of business mentoring

Business mentoring is crucial, especially in the development of companies that want to enhance their internal talent and improve competitiveness.

In addition, you can reap other advantages such as:

• Reduce staff turnover.
• Strengthen collaboration between employees with little common ground due to disparate factors such as age, digital divide, etc.  
• Identify opportunities to improve employee contribution. 
• Increase engagement and identification with the corporate culture. 
• Improve productivity and performance. 
• Encourage the exchange of ideas, creating value in your teams. 
• Promote transversality in the company. 
• Revalue senior profiles both in their ability to learn and to teach. 
• Develop future leaders in line with the corporate culture.
• Improve the work environment with a solid commitment to value.

Keep in mind that for the mentoring program to work, it must be supported by the company’s executives and have adequate funding and infrastructure. 

Without this enabling environment, the program will fail and the results will be demotivating and counterproductive. 

5 types of mentoring that promote learning

There are different mentoring types depending on the objectives you want to achieve or the characteristics of your teams. 

Although individual mentoring is usually the best known, we will tell you about five other very interesting alternatives.  

Group mentoring

Obviously, this is not a personalized mentoring class, but it is effective in attracting talent in the company or better defining the functions based on developed skills. 

Another exciting aspect is the exchange of ideas that originates among the different participants and the proposal of other points of view that are enriching for all. 

Group mentoring offers the opportunity to analyze a problem from very different perspectives that might not have been revealed individually. 

Reverse mentoring

Reverse mentoring is one of the most interesting at present, as it works to remove the digital gap. 

It creates links between junior profiles and executives in which the younger ones, digital natives, help the more experienced profiles develop their professional potential. 

On the other hand, it allows to discover innovative processes of generating and promoting ideas such as design thinking methodologies or design sprint – a 5-phase process focused on design thinking to reduce risks in product launches. 

Peer mentoring

Peer mentoring revolutionizes the very definition, as it works on peer mentoring. 

Specifically, this means that two people with similar levels or ranks are brought together to provide feedback and accompany each other in their evolution while exploring possibilities and detecting new opportunities.

Cross mentoring

This type of mentoring focuses on sharing experiences and learning between executives from different but related companies. 

Cross-mentoring is often also used in education to share innovative and effective teaching techniques. 

Digital mentoring

If there is a cornerstone of digital transformation, it is digital mentoring. 

It is shown as a necessary tool in sectors that can benefit from advances in technological innovations to enhance their competitiveness or simply not to be left behind. 

Some examples of sectors related to digital mentoring are those related to: 

• Big Data. 
• Internet of Things. 
• Cloud Computing.
• Robotics including M2M1 -machine-to-machine- communication. 
• Advanced analytics. 

One of society’s great challenges in digitization and working with remote teams is the accessibility of secure environments for their evaluations or online mentoring programs that require confidentiality and privacy.  

At Smowltech, we are leaders in developing flexible proctoring products that perfectly fit your remote monitoring needs. 

Ask us for your free demo, discover your company’s potential and solve all your doubts about our products.