“A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.”
Oprah Winfrey aptly highlights the power that a mentor holds in molding the life of a mentee.
There is a lot of uncertainty and doubt in the world out there but if a person has a guide who can help the person in their professional journey, things get really simplified. Such is the importance of mentorship in a person's life.
Coming to the academic mentorship aspect of mentoring, 60% of the alumni claim that the only mentor that they had in their life was a professor from their college. While, faculty mentors are experts in their fields and can surely enlighten the students on various aspects like conducting research, reaching out to more professors and advancing their analytical skills.
However, in today's scenario, students and young alumni need more insights into the actual industry and business world. They need to know about their future workplaces and practical knowledge to help them survive in the corporate world. This is where their faculty mentors might not be the best fit and alumni mentors come into play!
Alumni associations should run mentorship programs in order to help all the young alumni who are looking for a guiding light in their life.
Who would be better to guide young alumni than fellow alumni who are experts in the field! Through this article we shall explore how an alumni mentorship program run by an alumni association can benefit all the three stakeholders- the mentees, the mentors and the association / college.
Benefits for mentees
In every mentorship program the biggest beneficiaries are the mentees who are going to get guidance from a mentor. Once a mentee is matched to an appropriate mentor, the path becomes pretty clear for the mentee. Let's take a look at the wide array of benefits that alumni mentorship programs offer to the mentees:
Students and young alumni get to personally interact with a skilled and experienced mentor who provides them guidance and prevents them from committing any mistakes in their professional journey ahead.
Interacting with a mentor helps them in enhancing both their technical and soft skills. They get to know where they lack and in which areas they must put in more efforts.
The mentees get guidance from someone from their own alma mater and that would help them open up easily to the mentor as they will be able to relate to the mentor.
Such a program helps in increasing employment opportunities for young alumni as they would enhance their skills and will get ample networking opportunities due to the influence of their mentor.
They would be able to gain actual insight into the current industry situation through their mentor. Their mentor would be able to give them a clear picture of workplaces and current best industry practices.
The benefits are immense and would stay with the mentee for a lifetime. Such an alumni mentorship program can impact the lives of young alumni in ways which makes them grateful for life.
Benefits for Mentors
Mentors do a noble deed by guiding young alumni and do so without any hidden incentives. Mentees benefit immensely from the guidance that they receive from their mentors. There are a few benefits that mentors too gain from mentoring alumni.
The mentors get good publicity and are looked up to by a lot of young alumni. This boosts the image of the mentors in the network and in general too.
The mentors are able to give back to the society and able to help young alumni and this brings them an immense sense of satisfaction.
The mentors are able to train mentees and identify talent which they can hire for their organization. This gives mentors access to talent which can help them in their own work too.
By providing guidance and training mentors too get to learn a few things from their mentees and grow in the process. Every teacher learns a lot from their students and thus mentors too get to hone their skills.
The benefits for mentors might be few but the sense of satisfaction means a lot to many people and they are correct fit for becoming mentors!
Benefits for Alumni associations
Since the alumni associations run alumni mentorship programs there surely are going to be benefits in store for them. Alumni associations work towards building a strong alumni network and produce best alumni in conjunction with the institute. If mentors guide the young alumni nicely, a lot of alumni can grow and become successful in their fields and this finally leads to the publicity of the alumni network, association and the institute too. Let's deep dive into all the benefits of running mentorship programs for the alumni associations:
The alumni are able to give back to the network in a better way when they have themselves benefitted from it. This leads to a chain reaction and the beneficiaries help more people ahead. This enhances the overall engagement in the network and an engaging network is all that an association wants.
The brand image of the alumni association is boosted a lot since a good mentorship program produces more successful alumni.
The overall connect of the association and the college with the young alumni increases.
More and more people would be willing to take the membership of the association just to get access to the special mentorship programs and in the long run this could open financial benefits for the association too.
Past statistics reveal that associations running mentorship programs alumni retention rates increase to 40% and new membership rates to 60%.
There are multiple benefits for the alumni association and this is the very reason why every alumni association must run an alumni mentorship program.
Comments