At Mentor Match we want to support Civil Service Local’s vision of a Civil Service connected across the whole country by making it easy to find the right mentor or mentee, wherever you happen to be based. We want to make sure everyone, regardless of location, grade or department, has easy access to the mentoring opportunities they need to develop and fulfil their goals.
Mentor Match is an independent website set up by a small group of civil servants in their spare time, to try and improve mentoring across the Civil Service. It's a website that helps you match with a mentor or mentee based on your skills, location and preferences. There are nearly 3,000 people signed up and, once registered, you can search for people in a particular location, profession, or with particular experience.
We set out to tackle some of the fundamental problems we've found trying to get suitable mentors for ourselves:
- Overcoming geographic restrictions - Prefer face-to-face mentoring but unable to travel? Filter your matches by location.
- Maximising connections - Happy to speak on the phone but don't know how to make connections with people in other locations? Search for people across the UK who are open to phone-based mentoring.
- Targeting relevant experience - Struggling to find someone to talk to in your own or another profession? Narrow your results by profession or particular skills.
These, and all of the other new features we have planned all come from the feedback you and other users provide - if you have any ideas about how to make it better, we would love to hear them.
Mentoring is a great way to form new networks and share experience across boundaries. Being a mentor, as well as a fulfilling experience, can be crucial to developing valuable skills, and being mentored can help you overcome problems, plan your career and develop capabilities.
Signing up is easy and only takes a few minutes – just visit www.mentormatch.org.uk on your computer or smartphone, or if you have a question you can contact them at hello@mentormatch.org.uk
Mentor Match aims to make sure that everyone has access to mentoring and to link up people across departmental boundaries.
We believe that mentoring should not be about ‘who you know’, but what works best for you..