Looking forward to the kick off of DCU’s Structured Mentorship Program this year and the superb support from the Alumni team in promoting engagement within the global DCU Alumni community.  As I have been mentoring within corporate and start up organisations for over two decades, I strongly believe that Mentorship Programs are an L&D focus area that has measurable ROI, strengthens employee engagement and contribution, aligns with leadership and succession planning and supports a culture of diversity and equality. Impactful leaders know that words create worlds; they shift the conversation by reconnecting with their teams to enable individuals to have ambition, awareness of gaps and an environment to flourish and succeed.

However, ways to calculate the ROI and OKRs must to be tracked within organisations to promote mentoring as a key strategy.  Recently in the LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, Mentorship was ranked the #1 focus area for L&D with mentees and mentors 5 times more likely to be promoted.  That, and the additional benefits of greater job satisfaction and sense of belonging and improved skill development for participants. 

But how can we sell the ROI on mentorship?  According to stats from The National Mentoring Day regarding professionals who have a mentor, 97% say they are valuable yet only 37% of professionals surveyed actually have a mentor, citing their organisation has no formal mentorship program.  Interesting – so the benefits are recognised but not by all.  Perhaps this latest report by MentorcliQ, a US based data spread, found that 100% (yes, all of them) of U.S. Fortune 50 companies have structured, thriving mentoring programs.  Not a bad benchmark.

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