A cross-industry mentoring programme is where experienced people from one organisation mentor individuals or teams from another. It can be offered to:

An individual for their career development

A business team or unit that wants to approach the way they do things from a different perspective

A team or person who is managing a new and/or challenging project who would benefit from talking to people who have successfully completed such a project.

External mentoring programmes can be applied to any area of your business, any sector and any issue.

There are many benefits to offering your employees external mentoring, the most significant include:

The development of key business skills
Increased confidence and know-how
A wider network of business contacts
Improved productivity, performance and results
Improved processes, procedures and ways of working to optimise business performance
Greater ‘out of the box' thinking leading to business innovation
A talent pipeline for future leadership positions
Improved leadership and management skills
Increased company loyalty and reduced turnover costs
Broader business perspectives through cross-industry exposure

You may have fewer internal mentors than are needed for your mentoring pool so external mentoring will fill the gap

You may have expertise gaps within your internal mentor pool which external mentoring can fill

External mentoring offers your mentees valuable new perspectives to bring back into your organisation. 

Smarter Networking finds and matches external business mentors for individuals or teams from all types of organisations and can work with you on every aspect of running a successful External Mentoring Programme including:

Align your internal and external mentoring programmes
Design an external mentoring programme to meet your particular needs
Brief your senior management about the external mentoring programme 

Find and select external business mentors to match your needs
Provide marketing information for your intranet web site
Help you decide who to involve and identify key issues needing to be resolved
Manage the practicalities of running the external mentoring programme
Monitor the progress of the mentees and mentors
Create external mentoring case studies to keep the learning within your organisation 
 

This is for organisations who want to support their key personnel by giving them some quality time with an external mentor. The main benefit of the external mentoring programme is that it gives people the space and inspiration to ‘think' differently, to experience something outside of their normal environment and to innovate. All of which result in increased performance, creativity and personal motivation.

External mentoring for career development normally takes place over a long-term basis, i.e. 6 months, and often focuses on the mentee's career aspirations to give them experienced insights.

Mentees are matched with external mentors with demonstrated leadership experience who have an established professional track record and are enthusiastic about their growth and that of their protégé. Most importantly, external mentors are chosen for their investment in and commitment to the concept of one-to-one learning. They have exhibited the ability to be effective listeners and to deliver clear and constructive feedback.

This is a short-term external mentoring programme often focusing on a ‘commercial' or single issue that requires an external perspective or stimulus.

Access to mentors who have already completed the ‘same' project, but come from a different industry, sector or background. This will give the team or individual mentees the space and inspiration to think differently, to experience something outside of their normal environment and to innovate. 

Mentees are matched with external business mentors with demonstrated experience and an established professional track record who are enthusiastic about their growth and that of their mentee. 

Cross-Industry Mentoring Programmes for Teams bring together senior management teams from very different industries, cultures and organisations to share best practice, innovate, cross fertilise processes and find creative solutions. In this context, external mentoring, is normally used on a short term basis.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD) has produced a factsheet on mentoring and gives introductory guidance. Smarter Networking follows these guidelines and hopes you will find the following link and information of great interest. The CIPD factsheet:

Explains what mentoring is and how it differs from coaching
Introduces some of the ways in which mentoring can be beneficial
Describes the qualities and characteristics required for a productive mentoring approach
Briefly introduces some case studies of successful mentoring
Explains the role HR plays in managing mentoring activities
Includes the CIPD viewpoint

Mentoring is a long standing form of training, learning and development and an increasingly popular tool for supporting personal development. In their Learning and Development Survey 2008 they identified coaching and mentoring together. Open link....