The professional mentoring programme is an opportunity for those in industry, freelancing, or running their own business to support our final-year undergraduate students as they come to the end of their studies and embark on the world of graduate employment.
The aim of the programme is for mentors to help our final year students, as mentees, with the following:
- Gain confidence: You can help develop the skills for our students to find and apply for internships and graduate opportunities.
- Expand networks for our students: You can help with introducing our students to a variety of contacts you will have gathered throughout your career – some of these contacts may have graduate roles being advertised that our students could apply for.
- Build resilience: You can help our students navigate challenges and employment challenges. You can help our students with setting tasks for them to do so they can enhance their chances of being employed and help them with interview skills and responses/experience that you would want to hear as an employer.
- Career pathways: Help our students in exploring all career pathways that you think may be relevant for them and sharing your experiences of how you got to where you are today.
Many mentors sign up to the programme either as part of their learning and development programme or through utilising their organisation’s employee volunteering provision. We recommend you speak with your line manager ahead of signing up to the programme and are happy to speak with employers about how they can benefit from participation in the programme. In addition to benefiting our final year students, becoming a mentor provides many benefits to participants and their organisations including:
- Learning and development – Participation allows the individual mentor to develop their communication and engagement skills; adapting their approach to the needs of individual mentees.
- Recruitment insights – Being a mentor allows you to understand first hand the challenges facing emerging talent. While being a mentor should never be considered as being a substitution for research it does allow your colleagues to develop their experience of working with our student community.
- Community engagement – Many employers offer staff volunteering programmes and this is a great skill based volunteering opportunity for you to promote amongst your workforce. Employers benefit from association with a TEF Gold rated University.
2025/26 cohort
This year’s programme will run from October 2025 and finish before Easter in 2026. All communication between a mentor and a mentee will be on Vygo – this is an exciting tool where you will create your own profile and be matched with a mentee. Virtual sessions, scheduling next meetings and logging mentoring sessions can all happen here. You can also integrate calendars you use electronically into the system. Training sessions will be available virtually as we get closer to the autumn.
If you wish to be a mentor, please fill out our collaboration enquiry form. Please select that you wish to discuss being a professional mentor and we can send you further information and allocate a mentee to you once you have completed your profile in our Vygo system. You can contact careers.mentoring@solent.ac.uk if you have any specific queries.
Finally, while the time commitment is between the mentor and mentee, we recommend you allow for meetings to take place once a week or once a fortnight for typically, an hour’s time. This is something you can establish with your mentee in the first session you have with them.
