The way mentoring programme design was approached ten years ago needs to be reconsidered in the light of more recent generational differences in the workforce. By 2020 half the working population globally will come from the generation born between 1980 and 2000. As generations evolve, so do the methods for training, developing, coaching and mentoring people. Mentoring someone from the Millennial Generation (sometimes known as Generation Y) is not textbook developmental mentoring as we have experienced it previously. Understanding Millennials’ quite different career and value expectations is key if mentors are going to provide the right type of support to them, as well as the form of mentoring that Millennials relate best to, in order for organisational mentoring programmes to be effective.
‘Tech-savvy and lazy?’, How to mentor millennials
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I’ve been shocked this week after some conversations at a conference about the number of organisations who are dismissing mentoring as ‘too labour intensive’, ‘difficult to keep the energy in the programme’ or just plain ‘ineffectual’. Anyone who knows me and understands my passion for mentoring will immediately understand the emotional response this has created. In the seventeen years I have been working designing and developing mentoring programmes, I have found that organisations who are focused and structured in their approach to mentoring get amazing results and it is not difficult or particularly hard work if you know what you are doing. 
Formal and informal mentoring relationships exist in many organisations. Within these mentoring relationships the 
I have developed an