With all the recent press about the investment of higher education in this country today, students and their parents–now more than ever–are researching what their school will do for them AFTER they graduate. U.S. News has recently ranked America’s Best Colleges 2013 and on each school’s profile page, has included a “Jobs and Internships” tab. This is because so many students and their parents are not only considering where to get the best education, but what their school can do for them after graduation. A University Alumni Mentoring Program would be considered a great value to these students and parents who are carefully considering what could possibly be THE biggest investment of their lifetime.
In a recent post, we discussed How Alumni Mentoring Programs Can Help You to Recruit Talent. Have you considered utilizing your alma mater’s resources (i.e. recent and upcoming grads) to find and develop talent for your organization? Have you always had a desire to mentor, but don’t know who to mentor? Or, maybe you are a grad looking for creative ways to network. An Alumni Mentoring Program can pair grads together with professionals that may be looking to recruit talent or have a desire to mentor.
But what if your university doesn’t offer an alumni mentoring program? How can you get your school to support one? The key is to demonstrate to the university and to the alumni the value of mentoring and then to show them how easy it is to set up a mentoring program.
Value of Mentoring:
1. Increased university support: Did you know that engaging alumni in a mentoring program could bring greater interest and loyalty to the university? This will lead to increased support for other programs that the university may have — like job fairs, fundraising events, and alumni relations—not to mention Admissions (refer back to the opening paragraph of this blog post!).
2. Benefits to the mentor include giving back, building and increasing a network, developing great listening skills, and the chance to “try out” a potential employee by getting to know their work ethics, goals, and personality.
3. Knowledge transfer: Both mentors and mentorees have a great deal of talent to offer one another, which generally goes untapped. A mentoring program linking alumni with graduate students is a way to transfer that knowledge.
Ease of setting up a mentoring program:
Setting up a mentoring program in today’s technological world is easy to do and benefits both the schools’ alumni as well as current students. Management Mentors offers an easy to use mentoring software program— Mentoring complete. MentoringComplete offers simplified program set up, precision and/or auto matching of pairs, keyword search, and tons of mentoring resources to help guide mentoring pairs through a successful mentoring relationship.
So if you think your university could benefit from an Alumni Mentoring Program (and we believe they all could!), please feel free to share this post with your supervisor. You may also contact us or click on the button below to learn more about Mentoring complete.