Mentoring FAQs

Being a Mentor and encouraging a student to achieve their potential is an incredibly rewarding experience.

By participating in Career Mentoring, you will have the opportunity to:

• Share your knowledge and experience
• Encourage a student to achieve their potential
• Develop your interpersonal, communication and coaching skills
• Give something back to society
• Meet other Mentors and extend your professional network

You will also receive a LinkedIn badge and certificate to demonstrate to your professional contacts that you invest in people.

Career Mentoring will run between January and June 2025. Mentor training will take place in December 2024 and Mentors will be notified of their student match by the end of 2024.

Mentors will be required to commit to three one-hour mentoring sessions over a six-month period between January and June 2025. Where possible, we recommend that at least one of these sessions is in-person.

Mentors are advised to seek permission from their employer (where appropriate) to conduct these sessions during working hours.

Mentoring sessions can be face to face, online, or a mixture of both.

The nature of mentoring interactions will be specific to the relationship and guided by what the student would like to get out of the experience. Interactions could involve face to face meetings, online meetings, office/site visits, work shadowing etc.

We are recruiting professionals from a range of industries and organisations to become Mentors.

Mentors will be selected using the following criteria:

• Proven professional experience, that is likely to have been obtained over a period of at least 2 years. Professional experience in a related field to our participating courses would be advantageous
• Mentors of Accounting students should have, or be working towards, accounting qualifications
• University of Hertfordshire alumni are particularly desirable Mentors
• Mentor participation is dependent on the availability of a suitable student match

We will carefully match Mentors with students using the information provided on the registration form, which includes:

• Mentor’s industry, profession and areas of expertise
• Student’s course and career aspirations
• Preference to meet in-person/online

Career Mentoring is a targeted scheme aimed at supporting students from courses whose graduates are underrepresented in graduate level employment. The 2024/25 participating courses are Accounting, Business and Accounting, Film and Television Production, Economics and Business Economic Pathways. Participating courses may change from year to year.

Mentor training will cover areas such as:

• The scheme’s remit and timescales
• What mentoring is and what it isn’t
• How to be a successful Mentor - key mentoring skills and practical tools
• Suggested topics to discuss during mentoring meetings
• Participant conduct

Multiple online and in-person training options will be offered so that you can attend at a time and date that suits you. If you attend an in-person training session, you will also have the opportunity to meet other Mentors.

Mentor training is mandatory to ensure you know how the University of Hertfordshire Career Mentoring will work and what is expected of you as a Mentor. We understand that some Mentors will have more experience than others and we will ensure our training is appropriate to a mixed ability group.

We will make it clear to students that they will not be offered a job after completing Career Mentoring, however we hope the experience will help students to become more competitive applicants in the future.

Mentor applications are now opened for 2024/2025

Contact us careermentoring@herts.ac.uk