My first year of mentoring with NMC

I received an email informing about mentoring a student with the National Mentoring Consortium (NMC). I’ve mentored in the past but not a student so I thought I give it a go. I completed an application form giving my reasons why I wanted to get involved. My application was successful and I was invited to a training day at the University of East London. Although I have mentored before I wanted to attend the training to better my knowledge and skills in mentoring and also to network with others who had mentored with NMC before.

I was glad I attended as I learnt a lot from the training. The trainer was excellent and made it very enjoyable and informative. I also was able to network with many others from various government departments (Metropolitan Police, DWP, Home Office, Treasury to name a few). We were also given a pack which had lots of useful information and relevant forms. It was a reference guide for me throughout the programme.

I was then invited to a half day to meet your mentee. This was exciting to meet my student mentee for the first time. We were all given a sealed envelope each and were told to open the envelope which had a name. For me it was a name of a mentee and we all had to find our mentee/mentor which was good fun too.

Once we met we introduced ourselves and got talking. We spoke for a couple of hours and we could both see how the mentoring relationship will help us both. We swapped numbers and arranged meetings. I was hesitant how I was going to help an IT student in an office environment but thinking outside the box lead to brilliant opportunities. I was in the process of launching a mentoring programme within HMRC and I got my mentee involved by using his IT skills to designing products. I made him work to tight deadlines and we successfully launched a mentoring programme within our mentoring partnership. My mentee got lots of experiences and skills to put on his CV and we did 2 mock interviews where he was able to give examples on his work experiences with the HMRC.

He also built his confidence and was able to do a presentation on his experiences of a mentoring programme as a mentee at our HMRC launch in front of Senior Managers and Directors. Again something for his CV, not many students get the opportunity to say this.

Throughout the programme NMC have been supportive and Flavia Gregoire has been very professional and my first point of contact. She has always responded within a day or two of my query.

NMC jointly with the Academy of Engineering organised an end of programme Award Ceremony. The ceremony had high profile speakers who gave some very powerful and inspiring speeches. A massive achievement for me was to be nominated for and to WIN the ‘Mentor of the Year’ award. I would recommend more Universities and Employers to get involved in this worthwhile programme.

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