Competency areas of employees and competency gaps of the mentoring program

Using a dedicated application to implement a mentoring program gives a number of benefits – it streamlines the start-up and management of the process, helps those with no experience to implement, saves time and increases process efficiency. But there is another additional benefit associated with structured processing of large amounts of data. It is analytics – the ability to analyze data and draw conclusions. 

I realize that analytics is not an obvious topic for HR or L&D processes. However, analyzing numbers and drawing conclusions can bring a lot of benefits. It can provide concrete knowledge to put into practice. 

Data analysis in mentoring

Speaking of a mentoring process management application – such as Mentiway – the lessons learned can start at the very beginning – with recruitment forms. 

Mentiway provides the opportunity to personalize the recruitment forms in terms of a list of questions. Within these questions is also a list of areas – competencies that, on the one hand, Mentees indicate as something they can help their couples with. On the other hand, Mentees indicate areas they want to develop as part of the process. 

When participants send their applications to the mentoring program, they mark the desired areas.  

This provides a first set of data to analyze and to draw interesting conclusions already at the recruitment stage of the mentoring program. 

Strengths of the management team – analysis of the competencies of mentors 

First, based on this data, we can analyze the areas marked by Mentors -usually people in managerial positions-as those in which they want to share their knowledge and experience with Mentees. 

On the one hand, on this basis, one may be tempted to identify potential strengths of the management team and possibly compare them with the desired competency model in the organization checking where there are potential gaps.  

On the other hand, in this way we will also gain a list of those competencies that are least often indicated as strong in Mentors, which perhaps need further development or confidence building. 

Needs analysis among Mentees 

A similar analysis is possible in terms of the applications of Mentees, who mark in the forms the areas selected as those to develop under the guidance of Mentors 

Again, on the one hand, we see here those areas that are indicated most often. Those in which the desire for development is declared by the largest number of participants. This may be a clue to the realization of separate, dedicated training courses. 

On the other side of the list, we can identify those categories that are the least selected, and therefore either the least desirable or those in which Mentees already feel sufficiently proficient. 

Coverage areas and competency gaps of the mentoring program 

It is also interesting to see the juxtaposition of the two aforementioned categories of data – areas that are indicated as strengths in Mentors with those that are selected as desirable in Mentees. 

With this comparison, we can get what we call the mentoring program’s compentency gaps. 

This is a list of areas that are often identified as ones to be developed by Mentees, but on the other hand are not very popular among Mentors strengths. These are potentially areas that may not be met by the current mentoring program and may require additional training, workshops, or expansion of the Mentor group to include outsiders. 

A similar analysis can already be made at the level of created mentoring pairs  

Typically, the coverage of Mentors’ competencies with Mentees’ needs in pairs is not 100%. That is, in a given mentoring pair, of the several areas selected by the Mentee only a few are reflected in the knowledge and experience of the Mentor or Mentee  

Taking this into account, we can assume that in mentoring processes, competencies within these gaps will not be developed in Mentees in their pairs. Here again, the juxtaposition of these “uncovered” competencies can provide interesting conclusions and a basis for decisions regarding separate dedicated training or development workshops.

Here I have presented just a few examples of how you can take advantage of the data collected during mentoring processes. In future articles, I will deepen this topic with more ideas and opportunities provided by using Mentiway -a dedicated mentoring platform.