Mentoring Scheme

IIRSM’s mentoring scheme helps you be a mentor or mentee to develop your skills, grow your network and receive one-to-one support from a dedicated professional to enhance your career progression.  

IIRSM members can benefit from a brilliant digital platform with a wealth of tools to help you find a suitable mentoring match, manage your mentoring relationships, schedule meetings and track goals, whether you’re a mentor or mentee.

You must be an IIRSM member to be eligible for the Mentoring Scheme.  In order to access the exclusive registration link page you must be logged in to the website.  

As part of the process you are asked to provide some information about your experience and what are you are looking to achieve through participation in the scheme, whether as a mentor or mentee.  

Whether you’re meeting face-to-face or online, our scheme has been developed to align with the IIRSM Risk Management and Leadership Competency Framework. The framework helps you identify any knowledge or skills gaps that the mentoring relationship can help you develop and enhance. 

We expect those participating in the scheme to be matched for an initial period of three months, however there are no set rules and the relationship can continue beyond this point if all is going well. The most important thing is that both parties agree and commit to the duration at the beginning of their relationship, and any changes to this later down the line are also mutually agreed. 

The frequency and length of each meeting is to be mutually agreed by the matched individuals. It will depend on what the mentee wants to achieve as well as the time both are able to commit. As a minimum, we would expect individuals to meet at least three times over the three-month period. Meetings can take place face-to-face or remotely, via the IIRSM Mentoring platform, Teams or telephone. 

When you register on our mentoring platform as a IIRSM mentor and/or mentee and answer some simple questions about you and what you want to achieve, you’ll receive a list of recommended mentoring matches. 

Recommendations will be based on a wide range of data sets and our platform’s algorithms take into account the following when suggesting suitable mentoring matches: 

• Availability of mentors 

• Location of mentors and mentees 

• Organisations of mentors and mentees 

• Universities or colleges of mentors and mentees 

• Profile and mentoring preference keywords 

• Mentoring areas of help. 

Once you’ve found a suitable mentor or mentee, you can click on the ‘Request’ button and then complete a very simple form to set expectations on things like length of mentorship and frequency of meetings. 

And if you receive a mentoring request, either from someone requesting you as a mentor or mentee, you’ll be notified by email. 

Each mentoring relationships has its own ‘management panel’ to help you view details and keep track of the goals you’ve set. 

And scheduling a new mentoring meeting couldn’t be easier. You’ll be able to simply click on the ‘Schedule a Meeting’ bar and select a date, time, time zone and mentoring meeting length.

There are three mentoring programmes available:

Career Progression Mentoring

Career Progression Mentoring Programme Programme 2: Peer to Peer Mentoring Scheme Programme 3: Reverse Mentoring Scheme Join this scheme as a mentee if you are seeking support from someone who has a wealth of experience to learn from. Join this scheme as a mentor if you are an experienced professional who has a strong interest and enthusiasm for developing individuals earlier on in their career. 

Peer to Peer Mentoring

Peer to Peer mentoring is for you if you're looking to connect with an individual working at the same level as you but in a different function, company or industry to gain an alternative perspective on how to approach your work, to share your own experiences and support one another through similar challenges.

Reverse Mentoring

Reverse mentoring has, in recent years, become a popular approach to mentoring. The biggest difference is that reverse mentoring is where those who typically wouldn’t have considered themselves to be experienced enough to be a mentor are. The reverse mentor often mentors someone more senior to share challenges they’re facing, educating them and helping them to develop in a wider array of areas and focal points.