In celebrating National Mentoring Month I wanted to take a close look at mentoring practices and offer a few ideas for the modern mentor.
Never before has the need for rapid learning been greater. The swiftly changing workforce and marketplace bring new challenges every day; generational pressures and attitudes make transferring knowledge both critical and difficult; and downsizing and consolidation of organizations means each worker has increased responsibilities that require new understanding and skills.
Today’s highly effective learning systems integrate social networking elements with a technology-supported infrastructure that promotes learning outside traditional mentoring pairings or groups. While the expansion of e-Iearning, learning content management systems and knowledge management databases has increased access to information, new forms of social learning connection technology will lead the way to actual employee performance improvement. Continuing to expand the conceptual understanding and the range of applications for mentoring will be critical to implement any social learning system that will:
• Use technology to increase access to knowledge in a relational context.
• Facilitate intentional learning relationships in a goal- and competency-centered process.
• Create a growing network of social learning opportunities. A system like this will create intentional learning relationships by providing a learning structure and access to virtually all the tacit knowledge in an enterprise. Personal learning networks will form that speed tacit knowledge transfer in real time.
Connecting this with various forms of mentoring will expand talent development, employee engagement, productivity and retention efforts.
Mentoring has proven value in accelerating the application of training and helping to on-board and engage talent. Through new technology the opportunities for group mentoring are a great way to help leverage synergies.
How have you or your organization leveraged mentoring opportunities?
Ken Boxer Strategic Partners, Inc. www.spisolutions.com
