AMCI's Mentoring Program White Paper

July 2003

“As technologies and services in our society become more competitive, the deciding factor is how well organizations develop their most valuable asset — their people. Human capital development is quite challenging particularly in today's work environment. Traditional training may not keep pace. Employees often lack the time to pursue new knowledge on their own.

Facilitated mentoring helps you to turn your most experienced and valuable personnel into a cadre of relevant trainers who because of the mentoring process become positioned to share their expertise to an attentive audience. Dynamic Mentoring is an action-oriented, organization-specific mentoring system designed to build a legacy of enterprise knowledge.

Dynamic Mentoring is comprehensive, process-oriented, and immediately usable. The program uses experienced facilitators to assess needs and capabilities, train mentors and mentorees and build a system for feedback, evaluation, and continued growth. The programs unique web-based “matching” system allows easy access and broad participation.”

The Dynamic Mentoring Program

Mentoring is the art of using one's experience to help others learn, grow, and mature while navigating the obstructions that can often arise. It involves partnerships between the experienced and the inexperienced, the seniors and juniors, the “old timers” and the “young bucks”, the “grizzled vets” and the “rookies”, to help facilitate such growth. The end result is to bring these people together as a community intent on pooling the collective knowledge and sharing the lessons learned in a nurturing manner thus reducing the ramp-up time of the junior workforce, while simultaneously building a trust-based community.

To accomplish this, a good mentoring program must be highly customizable and designed to truly fit within the organization and complement the vision. Successful mentoring programs require training and coaching of the participants to effectively transmit information and corporate understanding/culture. Organizations with cultures that foster communication and nurture awareness are among the easiest to train. A greater challenge involves data-driven, engineering-based environments. Regardless of the unique culture, any organization can benefit from our customized approach which involves mentorees tapping into mentorsí support, guidance, and coaching to chart goals for professional development, identify developmental activities, recognize unwritten rules, and navigate the organization.

The AMCI program is multi-faceted and includes the following:

• Strategic planning — We help organizations decide exactly what they want to accomplish. We help them identify which groups of people to involve; how theyíd like the details to look; and how they'd like to measure success in this endeavor.
• Matching — AMCI uses a web-based tool to support the application and matching processes, proven repeatedly to be successful.
• Training — We provide the training to support the participants' successes.
• Tracking — We join the client program coordinators in tracking the progress of the mentoring activities and relationships.
• Coaching — AMCI coaches the individual participants as they move through the mentoring process.
• Graduating — Successful participants are encouraged to go out to continue with another partner in the next iteration of the program (perhaps moving from the role of a mentoree to that of a mentor), and finally,
• Evaluating — We help the participants evaluate and report their experiences.

One of the major distinctions of this program is the web-based tool, “The Mentoring Connection”, which is provided by our strategic partner and the developer of the Dynamic Mentoring Program, The Training Connection. This software enables us to easily gather the participants' demographic and career information, match them with others who have expressed similar desires for mentoring partnerships, track their activities, training, and opportunities taken, and, most importantly, evaluate their participation/performance. Without this automated tool, management of the program would be a tremendous challenge of tracking and administration. The most common complaint among organizations who have been disappointed by mentoring programs in the past is that they started out with plenty of flash and spark, but faded to grey once the program was underway. The AMCI program has a beginning and an end, with monitoring, coaching, training events, and evaluations at distinct intervals throughout.

Some organizations desire to match partners across great distances. Some of our client organizations, for instance, routinely match military officers across entire continents and oceans. This is made possible by the plethora of communication tools that we enjoy today. Other clients group their partnerships by location.

Dynamic Mentoring may be the solution your organization has been searching for. Let AMCI customize a program to help you achieve your strategic goals and organizational objectives!

What would be the first steps for an organization considering a mentoring program for their employees or community? Contact Anne Cregger, 703-245-2453 acregger@amciweb.com, at AMCI to request a brochure and a meeting and demonstration of our program.