Mentoring has been around since the Odyssey. Most people are familiar with the tale of Odysseus returning from the Trojan Wars to find that his old friend Mentor had supported his son Telemachus, during his long absence. However, are you also aware than Mentor was actually the Goddess Aphrodite in the guise of Mentor? So the first mentor was actually female!
Formal mentoring became most visible with the Big Brothers/Big Sisters programme in New York in the 1920s and mentoring soon became an important part of the US corporate development scene. In the 1980s and 1990s it became more popular in the UK with the Labour Government using it extensively post 1997 as a tool to deal with “remedial” school children, unfortunately not a move which endeared it to all the parents at the time. Continue reading
The NWDA Business mentoring programme commenced in September 2009 and is seeking to support 3,000 SME leaders and managers in the North West of England over a three-year period. The aim of the programme is to establish an exemplary one–to–one mentoring programme demonstrating accredited quality standards. The focus of the mentoring is on small businesses with the potential to grow. This is a core objective of increasing the availability and standard of mentoring provision in the region and robust evaluation. 