Mentorship software 101: What is It & how does It benefit engineering teams?

by Tomomi Menjo

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

An effective mentorship program can have an tremendously positive effect on your business — after all, there’s a reason 91% of professionals with a workplace mentor are satisfied with their jobs. Establishing a successful mentorship program is essential to creating a fully-enabled business team. For software engineering and other technically-complex businesses, mentorship can also play a crucial role in creating a diverse team united under shared business goals. With the right approach to mentorship, engineering and tech teams can gain a better understanding of the company as a whole.

Yet, the administrative burden of such a program can be a major hurdle to success for many businesses. To enable mentorship in your business without overloading your senior team with administrative responsibilities, the key is to leverage mentorship software.

What is a mentorship software?

Mentorship software is a broad term used to describe a range of mentorship tools and digital resources.

In any business, mentorship can be vital to building a fully enabled team that can act with confidence, regardless of the experience level of the individual team members.

However, achieving a successful mentorship program can be difficult without adequate support.

This is where mentorship software comes in — with the help of this software, business teams can create better mentorship programs that match mentors to mentees with greater specificity based on a variety of different factors, such as:

Availability: When selecting potential mentors from your staff, it is crucial to know who is available during specific times. Mentorship software can help you organize your employees not just according to who would be a great mentor but also according to when specific professionals are available to teach training sessions, lead one-on-one meetings, and more.
Skills & Background: No two mentees will need the exact same help from a mentor — thus, not all mentors should be exactly the same either. With the assistance of mentorship software, you can identify the key skills and professional background that a mentor needs to successfully guide a specific mentee or group of mentees. This can also help you to narrow down your mentor pool to determine which mentors are the most ideal in any given situation.
Location: For businesses with either in-person or remote business teams, having mentors and mentees in the same location or timezone can be critical. Mentorship software can offer powerful filtering capabilities that enable you to identify the ideal mentor based on where they are located and their proximity to their mentees.

Mentorship software ultimately helps to bridge the gap between mentors and mentees, providing several key pillars of support that ensure mentors have the right resources they need to be effective leaders.

Moreover, mentorship software can simplify the process of creating a mentorship program at your business. This software can provide a variety of capabilities that reduce the operational burden of establishing a new mentorship program, such as scheduling automation and smart mentor matching.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at the key benefits mentorship software provides to engineering teams.

How does mentorship software benefit software engineering teams?

Mentorship software can be useful for businesses in all industries but especially for those in the realm of software engineering.

Historically, software engineering teams can end up disconnected from each other simply due to the complex nature of the roles of each team member. Mentorship software makes it possible to not only enhance communication between different departments but also ensure an entire engineering team is united under a shared business objective.

Let’s discuss five key benefits that mentorship software provides to software engineering teams:

Smart Pairings: One of the most important considerations in any mentorship program is how to create the best mentor-mentee pairings possible. Through mentorship software, your business can leverage digital tools that help you identify the best professionals in your team to act as mentors. Not only this but these same tools can also be leveraged to identify the specific needs of mentees, further helping you to determine the ideal mentor for each junior team member or new hire.
Hassle-Free Scheduling: Scheduling can often present a major challenge when it comes to establishing an effective mentorship program. Mentorship software offers scheduling automation that can greatly simplifies this challenge, enabling you to not only automate the scheduling process but also automate your notifications and reminders as well. This greatly reduces the administrative burden associated with a mentorship program.
Powerful Filtering: Mentorship software can offer powerful filtering capabilities to allow you to organize employees according to availability, location, skills, and other key factors. These filters are essential for determining the best possible mentor-mentee pairings, as well as helping to identify which senior or experienced team members are most interested in fulfilling the role of a mentor.
Progress Tracking: In any business mentorship program, it is crucial to track the progress and success of the program. Mentorship software provides the progress monitoring and reporting tools you need to stay on top of your company’s mentorship program by collecting feedback and assessing which pairings are most effective.
New Leadership: By creating the most ideal mentor-mentee pairings, you are ultimately setting both your business and staff up for success by enabling junior team members to learn from the best. In turn, these junior team members can become your business leaders of tomorrow, eventually even becoming the mentors to your next wave of new hires.

Final thoughts: PlusPlus is the all-in-one mentorship solution tou need

When discussing mentorship programs, it helps to consider the role a learning management system (LMS) plays.

An LMS can be vital for providing continuous education and educational resources to your team. For your mentorship program to be most effective, your business needs the right LMS solution that enables you to consolidate both your learning and mentorship resources into a single super tool.

At PlusPlus, we take LMS to the next level with our consolidated Employee Enablement Platform.

Not only does our platform offer all of the key capabilities of a successful LMS but it also provides the essential mentorship features you need to foster breakthroughs in your business team. With the help of our platform, you can match mentors and mentees with ease, all while benefitting from automated technology that eliminates the administrative burden of a mentorship program.