How to Start a Mentorship Program at Work

In the dynamic and ever-changing tech industry, knowledge becomes outdated very fast. With new programming languages and technologies appearing every day, there is no other option but to stay up-to-date with trends and look for ways to develop and expand your team’s skillset. Leading companies invest huge amounts of resources in talent development, as they understand that this is one of the main factors for the successful development of their business.

One of the best and most effective strategies to grow the skills of a tech team is implementing a mentorship program, which allows managers to develop their employees inside the team.

In this blog post, you will get a step-by-step framework to start a mentorship program for your engineering team and learn how to hack mentoring of developers with Ace AI.

Read: Full guide on how to start a mentorship program at work

Why is mentorship important?

According to a recent report on software development trends, the tech talent shortage continues to be a major issue for engineering managers. In fact, 86% of companies struggle to find and hire skilled tech professionals.

Moreover, retention has become a serious issue for tech companies, as 72% of IT employees were considering quitting their jobs in the next 12 months. While the #1 reason for employees to quit their jobs is lack of professional development.

To attract and retain top talent, companies are investing in the professional development and training of their engineers by implementing mentoring for their tech teams.

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE ON HOW TO START A MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

Step #1. Identify career path level

Step #2. Create PDP

Step #3. Monitor progress

As a bonus, we’ll explain to you how an engineering manager can implement AI at each step and hack the mentoring process.

Let’s dive into each step.

STEP #1. IDENTIFY CAREER PATH LEVEL

The first step is to assess an employee’s skills, find potential skill gaps, and identify the career path level (or a grade) of each developer. To do this, you should hold a skills review for the whole team and then analyze the review report.

To identify career path levels easily and fast, we recommend using AI tools that can do it for you.

Ace AI uses Git data to define the career path level of a software engineer, so you don’t need to run a time-consuming review and analyze its results. See how it works in practice:

Ace AI identifies career level based on Git data

STEP #2. CREATE PDP

After a manager identified skill gaps and the grade of developers, a professional development plan (or PDP) should be created.

A good professional development plan should contain learning activities and working tasks to develop focus skills.

To save time on the search for personalized learning activities for each developer, you can use Ace AI which gives personalized recommendations on mentors and learning activities such as courses, books, etc. based on their skill gaps.

See how Ace AI recommendations work in practice:

Personalized recommendations in Ace AI

STEP #3. MONITOR PROGRESS

In order to make the process of professional development effective and implement continuous learning in your tech team’s workflow, an engineering manager should hold regular 1-on-1 meetings with team members to track the progress and adjust their growth plans if necessary, as well as provide feedback on their skill development.

To help you with that, Ace AI writes automatic feedback for specific skills for you to save time.

Automatic feedback for skills in Ace AI

Also, Ace AI builds automatic agenda for your 1-on-1 meeting to discuss growth plan progress based on developer updates from Git and growth plan initiatives.

Automatic agenda for 1-on-1 meeting in Ace AI

This is how you can build a mentorship program for your engineering team and automate this process with the help of AI.

Read: Useful Tips For Mentors and Mentees

KEY IDEAS

• In the tech industry, knowledge becomes outdated very fast, and staying up-to-date with trends is essential for business success.
• Implementing a mentorship program is an effective way to grow the skills of a tech team, as well as attract and retain top talent.
• To start a mentorship program, engineering managers should follow a step-by-step framework: identify career path levels, create a professional development plan, and monitor progress regularly.
• AI tools like Ace AI can help automate the mentorship process, assess employee skills, identify skill gaps, provide personalized learning recommendations, and give automatic feedback for specific skills.