Benefits of Mentoring for Mentors and Mentees – Research (2025)

Mentoring is an extremely effective form of development. It has been known in the West for years and is becoming more and more popular in Poland every year. It provides a number of benefits both for the organisers of the mentoring programme (companies, universities, foundations and professional organisations) and, of course, for the participants themselves – Mentors, Mentees and Mentees.

In this article I will take a closer look at the perspective of the latter group – that is, the perspective of the participants in mentoring programmes.

Benefits of mentoring for companies

But before I move on to the participants themselves, a few more words of introduction for the organisers’ perspective.

The organiser of a mentoring programme can be not only a company, but also a university or a foundation/professional organisation. As the Mentiway mentoring platform, we support programmes from all three of these groups and for each mentoring brings individual benefits.

We have already written more on this topic in previous articles on our blog:

If you want to learn more about the perspective of companies, I invite you to read the article ‘Mentoring program in a company’, where you will learn about the results of a survey we conducted among representatives of HR teams and review case studies of mentoring implementation collected from the market.

You will learn more about the university perspective in our report on mentoring at universities. 

Survey among participants in mentoring programmes

In the first half of 2025, we published a report based on surveys collected among users of the Mentiway platform. This survey included more than 300 people – Mentors, Mentees and Mentees from dozens of different mentoring programmes.

Of course, I invite you to read the full report, which is available for free at this link: https://mentiway.com/en/mentoring-report-survey-among-mentors-and-mentees/ .

In this article, I have in turn collected selected findings from this report, those concerning the benefits perceived by mentoring participants. 

Versatility of mentoring – more than a dozen different benefits

I think the most important finding of this part of the report is that mentoring is extremely versatile.

According to our survey, of the 16 benefits selected by mentoring participants, as many as 12 are indicated by at least 40% of respondents.

In other words, mentoring is so versatile that everyone finds their own benefits and their own motivation. It is definitely not just a knowledge transfer process. 

The most popular benefits of mentoring

The first three most commonly cited benefits of participating in a mentoring programme are:

1. Widening/exploring a different perspective.

2. Establishing new relationships and friendships.

3. Increased self-awareness and insight

It is worth noting, however, that although these benefits are the most popular, their advantage over the others is really small. The third is separated from the fourth and fifth by only 10 percentage points.

Interestingly, these first three advantages are mentioned in the first places by both Mentors and Mentees. On the other hand, already at the next places the indicated advantages clearly differ between Mentors and Mentees.

Key benefits of mentoring for Mentees

For Mentees, the most commonly cited benefits, in addition to the three common ones, are those related to development goals, career and getting ongoing support.

Mentees highlight working on their professional and personal goals, getting help with career planning and getting feedback – constructive criticism on their own work and decisions.

1. Broadening/exploring a different perspective.
2. Increased self-awareness and insight.
3. Establishing new relationships and friendships.
4. Increased clarity of one’s professional and personal goals.
5. Receiving help with career development.
6. Receiving feedback and constructive criticism.

Key benefits of mentoring for Mentors

For Mentors, again in addition to the common first three advantages of mentoring, the development of communication skills, improved confidence and, interestingly, the development of selected skills and competences are important.

1. Broadening/exploring a different perspective.
2. Increased self-awareness and insight.
3. Establishing new relationships and friendships.
4. Development of effective communication skills.
5. Increased self-confidence.
6. Development of selected/mentored skills and competencies.

Benefits of mentoring versus the nature of the mentoring programme

Another very interesting finding from the report is that the advantages of mentoring – especially for Mentees – largely depend on who organises the mentoring programme.

Different advantages are perceived by participants in corporate programmes, others by male and female students, and others by Mentees from foundation programmes.

Students most often point to benefits related to career development and confronting situations of loss of motivation in their first job. These benefits include:

1. Assistance in career development.
2. Increased motivation and commitment to work.
3. Increased clarity of professional and personal goals.

Mentees participating in corporate programmes show more self-awareness and a desire for support in their daily work:

1. Receiving feedback and constructive criticism.
2. Increased self-awareness and insight.
3. Receiving useful tools for self-work.
   Expanding / learning about a different perspective.
   Development of selected/mentored skills and competences.
   Being able to share one’s problems with another person.

In contrast, for participants in programmes organised within foundations and professional organisations, it seems more important to establish new relationships and broaden their perspective.

1. To broaden/get a different perspective.
2. Establishing new relationships and friendships.
3. Increased self-awareness and insight.

Mentoring is definitely not only about transferring knowledge

I hope you find the data presented here interesting and in some ways revealing.

It is clear from them that mentoring is much more than it may seem at first glance. It is not just the transfer of knowledge from a more experienced person, the Mentor, to the Mentee. It is definitely a more diverse process giving different benefits to both the former and the latter.

Find out more about mentoring from our report: https://mentiway.com/en/mentoring-report-survey-among-mentors-and-mentees/