As the administrators of the Matched Mentoring scheme the IDS Alumni Relations Office will ask you to evaluate the mentoring programme at the 3-month and 6-month points in the programme. After 6-months the alumni relations office will no longer provide structured support for your mentoring relationship and at this point you can decide whether you wish to continue informally or not.

In addition, we encourage our mentors and mentees to consider having a session to evaluate the process and what you have achieved. Ideally you will do this at the mid-way and 6-month point of the mentoring period.

Mid-way

• Review the original objectives
• Review what you;ve both achieved so far
• Decide what has been working and not working during mentoring so far, and discuss ways to work more effectively
• Decide what is yet to be done and re-work the agreement, perhaps expanding or eliminating some items

Final evaluation

• Both prepare an outline of what felt the mentoing relationship provided, to share and talk about
• Celebrate each other’s successes
• Discuss major accomplishments, and if there is anything that didn’t work. Did you meet the goals? At the end of the relationship it is the responsibility of the mentee to put into practice what they have learnt, although you may wish to continue to have some form of interaction in the future.
• Decide if you wish to continue the relationship going forward
• Say goodbye

What if things aren’t going well?

Ocasionally things don’t work out like you expected. This can be as result of a bad fit, a mentor or mentee who doesn’t proactively participate in the relationship or communication issues. If this happens the first thing to do is address the issue directly with your mentor or mentee. If this doesn’t rectify the problem or you don’t feel comfortable doing this you can contact the IDS Alumni Relations Office who administrate the programme who will provide help and try and improve the situation - alumni@ids.ac.uk. However, if you are not satisfied with your mentoring relationship, there is no obligation to continue.

1. Get to know each other

2. Set mentoring goals and expectations

3. Develop a mentoring agreement and action plan

4. Conduct the mentoring sessions

All IDS Alumni Network Mentoring & Advice Programme Mentors are automatically members of the Mentors Group where you can find links to all of our useful resources, articles and details of upcoming skills workshops.

All who are interested in accessing the IDS Alumni Network Mentoring & Advice Programme can find find links to all our useful information on the Mentoring & Advice page.