BIS

 

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

BIS wanted to set up a formal mentoring programme with an aim to establish an initial thirty mentoring pairs.  The challenge for the L&D team was the limited resource they had to devote to running a programme and they fully appreciated the need for a programme coordinator to set up, run and support the programme to ensure maximum success and impact.

CA Support

To enable the L&D team to be as light touch with the programme as possible we became the external programme coordinator and supported the team in setting up their programme, including recruitment advice and communication materials, designing application forms, liaising with participants over queries and sign ups to workshops and consultancy around matching all pairs. We then designed the initial mentor and mentee workshops to be half day sessions as time was a challenge for all participants.

Learning Points

There was a great deal of enthusiasm for mentoring within BIS and application
numbers at all three phases were high with some applicants being turned away. Managing the expectations of these people was key to ensure no negative feedback for the programme.

Outcomes

The programme ran for 3 phases and successfully recruited, trained, matched and supported over 60 pairs. Some of the key outcomes noted were:

For mentees

• Increased confidence
• Higher motivation
• Enhanced commitment to the organisation
• Job promotion

For mentors

• Different perspective
• Challenge to their thinking
• View to another part of the business
• Improved coaching skills

Tim Andrews is the BIS Chief Statistician, and a mentor from Phase 1 and 3 of the programme. He has worked for the Civil Service for 20 years and in this role for nearly 5.

Tim decided to apply to be a mentor as he’d been doing quite a bit of informal mentoring and thought that this would be a good opportunity to formalise that. He found the initial training very useful and a more structured framework to work from was a great starting point as was being paired with an enthusiastic mentee.

He was pleased that it only took up about two hours per month plus some thinking time and the benefits have made that all worthwhile.  As Tim says, “(mentoring) is a skill based activity which needs to be practised and the scheme creates a good environment for that. In a way it was easier than operating in the line management role as I wasn’t directly responsible for my mentees day to day outputs or performance.”

Tim is extremely positive about the benefits of mentoring. He felt that his particular mentee would probably have done well without much intervention, but he feels that they are plenty of others within BIS who could get a lot out of the scheme. Tim emphasised that he would recommend the scheme widely – for mentees as “being mentored now seems to me such an important part of career development” and for mentors as it “helps to build leadership and management skills that can be applied generally”.