Mentoring goes digital: platform fills growing need for businesses

In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, cloud-based mentoring platform Mentorly launched a new enterprise solution to open up businesses and entrepreneurs to a world of resources. 

The web business, started in 2016 by St. Albert's Ashley Werhun and filmmaker Katherine Macnaughton, offers browsing, booking, video calls, follow-up tools, mentor matching and recommendations for users. Today, Mentorly has more than 700 international mentors.

With clients across North America, the newly launched Mentorly Enterprise platform opens up these services to integrate with schools, workplaces and large organizations. 

"(Mentoring) is not necessarily a 'nice to have' for employers any more. It's a must-have," Werhun said. "We believe mentorship is a really important part of the workplace."

More people are relying on online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in April, the two women noticed a 300-per-cent spike in usage of their platform.

Entrepreneurs are looking at new and alarming questions about the economy, students are looking at what the job market is going to be like next year, and employees of companies are really reaching out to find support, Werhun said. 

"Luckily, we've been built for this from day one."

When someone wants to set up a mentorship program, they can onboard all of their members to Mentorly Enterprise. Acting as a one-stop shop, each member will have a profile, online booking system and calendar to set up digital mentoring sessions with integrated video calls.

Then the program collects all the usable data so mentors and mentees can track their progress. You can see how many mentorship sessions are happening, who is working with who, mentee confidence, and other data. 

"They can onboard as many mentors and mentees as they'd like, scale the program and have them connect from anywhere in the world."  

In the past few weeks, especially with the Black Lives Matter movement, companies have been talking more about diversity and inclusivity, Macnaughton said. Hiring practices and mentorship has been proven to increase diversity within an organization, she said.

"It made sense for us to say, 'Hey, we exist, we're already doing this, we're not just for the arts. We're here to resolve your potential recruitment, retention and diversity issues internally.'"

Mentorly has racked up some notable clientele over the years.

The Government of Seattle's office of arts and culture uses the platform to support creatives throughout the state of Washington, Réseau Mentorat uses it to help support entrepreneurs in Quebec, and the platform is also used by the Canada Music Incubator.

Both Werhun and Mcnaughton believe mentorship will feature a prominent role in the future of work. The benefits of investing in education and advancement are there, and this way, mentorship can be more accessible for companies to make it a priority within their organization, Werhun said.   

"(Mentorly) is a very actionable way to show people that you are dedicated to providing mentorship and guidance and lead them through the success of their career and their life."