Building an Employee Career Path With a Mentor

Employees usually feel more engaged when they believe that their employer is concerned about their growth and provide avenues to reach individual career goals while fulfilling the company’s mission.

Building an employee's career path through mentoring provides employees with an ongoing mechanism to enhance their skills and knowledge that can lead to mastery of their current jobs, promotions and transfers to new or different positions. Implementing career paths may also have a direct impact on the entire organization by improving morale, career satisfaction, motivation, productivity, and responsiveness in meeting departmental and organizational objectives.

One of your business strategies this year may be increasing employee retention and engagement. Your employees may be at risk to leave your organization if they feel they don’t they have a career path. There is nothing worse than going to work in the morning to a “dead-end job”.

So what is one way to increase retention, and invest in the talent at hand within the organization without spending a substantial amount of money? Creating a career development process supported by mentoring.

A well tailored mentoring program can attract and retain top talent, and invest in employees by developing their career path. All of which improves employee engagement and productivity. We have compiled a list of 5 steps that employees can take to leverage mentoring as a career development strategy.

5 Steps to Building an Employee Career Path Through a Mentor:

1. Reflect Who They Really Are

   We recommend providing your employees the tools to learn more about themselves, through career assessments. Finding out what their Myers Briggs type will help them understand what profession would best fit them. For example if they are extroverted, going into sales may be a better fit than being a software engineer.

2. Explore Career Paths
   

   Allow employees to research available career paths within the organization. Provide a tool that allows them to explore all the available job profiles within your organization and the competencies needed for that specific job. They should choose a career path that they competencies already proficient in. This will make it more achievable. 

3. Choose A Qualified Mentor
   

   Help your employees find a mentor that can help them with their preferred career path. Having a mentor matching tool can guide them choose the right mentor wisely. They should pick a mentor on the competencies they have identified they need for their career path.

4. Set Development Goals
   

   Once your employee is been matched with a mentor, you should advise them to set smart goals. We have seen creating a learning plan best achieve this step in the process.

5. Track Development Progress
   

   Make sure your mentees are updating and redefining their agreed career goals through a learning plan during continued mentoring sessions with their mentor. This keeps the relationship focused and you are able to track if the program is working.

These 5 steps can act as a process for your employees to follow. It will keep it the career development activity focused and will increase their chance of moving up their preferred career direction.

Insala has all the tools needed for your employees to have a self-directed career path, this includes career assessments, uploading job profiles with competency descriptions, tools to find a mentor and set goals.

For more information about starting a mentoring program or implementing mentoring software to streamline the process, book a demo today.