Everything on running mentoring programmes, plus L&D, retention, inclusion and remote team building

Mentoring Programmes for SMEs: How to Run One Without an L&D Team

Most advice on running a mentoring programme is written for organisations that have a learning and development function. It assumes a programme manager, a training budget, an LMS, and a steering group. If you are the HR manager at a 60-person business - or the operations lead who inherited "people stuff" - none of that describes you.

How to Increase Engagement in a Mentoring Program: A 30-60-90 Day Playbook

What Happens to 8 Years of Expertise When Your Best Person Resigns?

Rhea has been with your organisation for 8 years. She's your VP of Operations — the person who knows which clients need a call before they escalate, which vendors can be pushed on terms, and how to read a cash flow crisis three months before it shows up in the numbers. She knows the unwritten rules. She knows what went wrong in 2019 and why. She knows how to get things done across three departments without a single meeting.

Cross-Functional Mentoring: How to Break Silos and Accelerate Skill Development

Cross-functional mentoring is a structured development relationship between employees from different departments. It helps people exchange specialist knowledge, understand how decisions affect the wider business and build skills outside their usual team. For organisations, it creates practical connections across silos without moving employees into new roles or relying only on classroom training.

25 Mentoring Session Questions & Agendas (Templates)

Most mentoring sessions drift into pleasant, forgettable catch-ups because they lack structure. This guide fixes that with 6 copy-paste session agendas - from the first chemistry-check to skill-transfer sessions and program wrap-ups - plus 25 mentoring questions organized by session type, a simple 4-part framework for any session, and answers to the most common questions about timing, frequency, and who owns the agenda.

Mentoring vs Coaching vs Buddy Programs vs Sponsorship: What’s the Difference?

HR teams use these four terms interchangeably, and it causes real problems: coaching budgets get spent on what should be mentoring, buddy programmes get asked to deliver Leadership development they were never designed for, and high-potential women get mentors when what the data says they need is sponsors. Here’s the full breakdown.

Mentoring Gen Z Employees: What They Expect (and What Drives Them Away)

Gen Z wants frequent, informal, two-way mentoring tied to visible career progress — and they disengage fast when mentoring feels hierarchical, vague, or performative.

Mentoring Statistics 2026: The Data Behind Why Mentorship Works

Every HR leader has felt this moment: you propose a mentoring program, and someone in the room asks, "But does it actually work?"Fair question. Mentoring has a warm, fuzzy reputation, and warm and fuzzy doesn't survive a budget meeting. What does survive a budget meeting is data — and the data on mentoring is unusually strong. Strong enough that PwC's survey of 4,702 CEOs found 45% don't believe their organisations will remain viable in ten years on their current trajectory — and building an agile, continuously learning workforce is one of the few credible answers to that. Mentoring sits at the heart of it.

What Is DEI, and How Can Mentoring Software Actually Help?

Most of us have sat through a DEI training at some point. Maybe there was a slide deck. Maybe a survey afterwards asking how it made you feel. And maybe, if you're honest, not much changed in the months that followed.

Best Mentoring Software for Distributed Teams in 2026

Most mentoring software comparison guides are written by the platforms themselves — which means they are structured to make the author look like the obvious winner and bury the one question buyers actually need answered: does this platform do matching well, or analytics well, or both?

The Hidden Cost of Not Having a Mentoring Programme in Your Organisation

Most organisations talk about people being their greatest asset. Far fewer put the structures in place to prove it. The absence of a formal mentoring programme is one of the most expensive gaps a business can have, and most leaders never notice it until the damage is already done.

Why Non-Profits Need Structured Mentorship More Than Anyone

Non-profits exist to serve others. That is their entire point. And yet, in doing so, they consistently under-invest in the people who make that service possible. The numbers are sobering - and strikingly similar whether you are looking at a charity in Birmingham or an NGO in Bengaluru.