At Airship we've been running a company-wide mentorship program since the summer of 2018. The desire sprung up from employees in our Diversity Guild group, and rather than waiting for the company to start a program, we built one from the ground up. The program has seen 50 mentor/mentee partnerships over the course of six sessions, with 12 active pairs in our Fall 2020 session (covid be damned!). Here's the story of how we built the Co-Pilot Academy at Airship — and how you can build one at your company, too.
When we set off to build a mentorship program, we were advised that company mentorship programs usually die off just two cycles in, usually because too much demand is put on the mentors and mentees and participants burn out.
The very top priority then became: how do we make this sustainable? How do we get mentors to come back and sign up for another round? How do we empower mentees to find success through mentorship?
To ensure we could keep a program running longer than two cycles, we landed on three key factors to keeping a mentorship program alive:
For the full story — including how the pilot program won leadership buy-in and what we learned about keeping mentors and mentees engaged — see the Co-Pilot Academy project page.