Many mentoring schemes involve specific training for their mentors before they start mentoring. If you don’t have any training, you might like to make use of the basic mentoring training on Moodle. It has been designed to take approximately two hours to complete and covers:

• Developing an understanding of the role and nature of mentoring
• Utilising mentoring skills of active listening and questioning techniques

Participants complete several activities including reading, short videos with questions and quizzes, and can download a certificate on completion. The quiz was designed to align with Institute of Leadership Management (ILM) level 2 qualification introduction to mentoring skills.

If you would like to have access to this resource, please contact Patrick Cheeseman

The university has invested in MentorNet software to help with the organisation and administration of mentoring schemes and reduce the time and costs. The software has been used by mentoring scheme organisers/managers at Brookes for a number of years, including for mentoring the Bacchus Mentoring Programme and for Accountants in Mentoring (AIM) scheme. Jane King, Senior Lecturer Accounting and Finance at Oxford Brookes and organiser of AIM says,

We used to have a paper-based system, with lots of paper, emails and LinkedIn groups, but they were all separate. Now we have MentorNet, everything is in one place and it is so much easier.

The software can support:

• mentors (and mentees) having profiles which can help in ‘matching’ if choice of mentor or mentee is part of the mentoring scheme;
• as a communication platform, either initially before face to face meetings or for e-mentoring schemes where the mentors and mentees do not meet;
• organisers can track, report and record meetings between mentors and mentees and send out communications to keep things moving;
• enabling students and mentors to share documents securely;
• allows organisers to run beginning and end of mentoring surveys and evaluations .

If you would like to have access to this resource, please contact Clare Martin

These mentoring webpages are part of a wider project at Brookes to raise the profile of all mentoring activity in the university and encourage a greater culture of mentoring for students and staff wherever they are in their studies or career.

If your scheme is not on the current list, please get in contact and tell us about it so we can add it to the pages and, more importantly, invite you to join the Brookes Mentoring Forum. This group is made up of coordinators/managers involved in mentoring at Brookes and meets to discuss issues around mentoring including the shared resources of mentor training, software and evaluation. Sustaining mentoring schemes takes work and resources and by working collectively the Brookes Mentoring Forum can helps support schemes.

For more information, please contact Gina Dalton