Creative Economy Blog

Mentoring

Angela Pugh - 23.02.2011

Business support and professional development are critical to growing the nation's talent and businesses. But with the onslaught of cuts to the public sector, cuts to business support services and the residual effects of the worst recession ever, how can the public and private sector provide these services effectively without breaking the bank? 

At NESTA, we've been looking at mentoring as one way of meeting this need effectively and at a relatively low cost. From working with creative businesses, to supporting disengaged young people our programmes demonstrate how with a little bit of organisation and some generous support of mentors you can have a huge impact on companies and people - really helping them to maximise their potential.

What exactly is mentoring?

The Chartered Institute of Personal Development (CIPD) defines mentoring as "...the long term passing on of support, guidance and advice. Also a form of apprenticeship whereby an inexperienced learner learns the tricks of the trade from an experienced colleague...".  There is definitely something unique about advice from someone who's been there and done it.  It can empower and motivate the next generation more than any text book or generic consultants. It's honest, reflective, firsthand experience that is invaluable and something that every growing company or person can benefit from.

At NESTA, we divide mentoring broadly into two types - personal and business mentoring. Personal mentoring is when someone helps an individual to focus on their own goals and ambitions even if that means working somewhere else. A good example of this is internal company mentoring when a person is assigned to someone to help them with their carrier development. Business mentoring is focused on business growth and what's best for the company. A good example of business mentoring is NESTA's Creative Business Mentor Network.

Mentoring is becoming increasingly popular

It's an attractive option for many reasons, not least because it's a very cheap and easy way of providing support and nurturing development. Given the right set-up, all it takes is a more experienced person giving up a bit of their time to help nurture someone who's looking for help. In business mentoring in particular the idea of industry to giving back to industry is a popular one for those who have achieved great success and want to pass on their expertise.

In addition a mentor is someone you can be completely honestly with, a sounding board and someone objective and removed enough to see the bigger picture. It can be lonely at the top - having an impartial, objective arm's length perspective can be a welcome offering.

What we're doing

NESTA has been running a variety of practical programmes over the last 3 years. Part of our aim has been to test what the optimal conditions are for mentoring in a variety of environments. We look to see what works and what doesn't and share our learning with industry and individuals who want to run mentoring programmes.

In business mentoring, our work has focussed on the creative industries. Businesses in this sector are typically set up by people whose creative talents outweigh their business acumen. With the creative industries offering exciting growth potential for the UK, we felt that business mentoring in this sector could have particularly strong impact.

Some of our programmes that feature mentoring are:

Creative Business Mentor Network (CBMN): NESTA has been running CBMN, a business mentoring programme for creative businesses in the UK for the past year and in September we launched year 2 of the programme. Creative media businesses are matched with high profile senior executives in their industry for a year. Mentors on the programme give up their time for free.  Most say that they would have liked to have had this kind of support when they were starting out.

Games Mentoring: In 2009, NESTA ran a Games specific mentoring programme. With the games sector, NESTA identified mentoring as one of a few initiatives to encourage growth within the industry. The programme had a very specific purpose to provide intensive support for independent games companies within the UK because the games sector was seen to be losing some of its key competencies within a sector it had previously dominated. The model used was more intensive than for CBMN. Mentors were paid for their work but gave 2 whole days a month.  

Starter for Six: S46 was a highly successful enterprise training programme that supports up-and-coming creative entrepreneurs across Scotland over 3 years. The programme took creatives that wanted to develop an idea into a business and helped them to create a viable business plan. They also received 3 telephone based coach calls and peer mentoring.

Peer mentoring doesn't rely on the 'mentors' being hugely more experienced than the mentees - they just have to have been through a programme before them and be able to articulate and share what happened to them.  

Peer mentoring is a really good way to extent the benefits of a programme. By reinvesting skills from previous beneficiaries and encouraging a virtuous circle of mentoring you will hopefully, if it works well, reduce the overall amount of capacity that the new group needs because they will be able to turn to their peers. 

ReSync: NESTA is working in partnership with one of the UK's fastest-growing charities - BeatBullying - to develop ReSync, an online social network that supports excluded and vulnerable young people with trained mentors, counsellors and advisors who guide and support disengaged young people and signpost them to specialist help and services where needed.

Importantly, ReSync enrolls young people to run the service. Mentors are themselves trained young people from across the UK, which gives them the opportunity to develop and use soft skills to support their peers. This is an approach that has already been used successfully on BeatBullying's anti-bullying website, www.cybermentors.org.uk, and it allows a model for scaling up the service as it becomes more popular.