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What is the Career Mentoring Scheme?

The Career Mentoring Scheme is a voluntary partnership where a mentor (employer) offers to share his / her expertise with a mentee (student) in order to provide practical support and encouragement.  It is a non-judgemental partnership, based on mutual trust and confidentiality, which encourages both parties to benefit and learn from each others experiences.   

Mentoring is a powerful tool for development where the mentor supports the mentee to manage their own learning by setting personal goals and working towards achieving positive change.  The mentor often plays a crucial part in the development of the mentees employability skills by helping them to understand the workplace, thus giving them a competitive edge in the graduate labour market.

Previous mentees and mentors have confirmed that involvement is mutually rewarding as it offers exceptional scope for the personal and professional development of both parties.  Additionally mentors value the opportunity to give something back to the community.

Why we have developed mentoring at Bradford?

Bradford is committed to recruiting a diverse student population and we are celebrated for continually attracting more underrepresented, non-traditional student groups in Higher Education, than the average university.  Over 50% of our current students are from non-white backgrounds and on average over a third of our students are over the age of 21.  However with diversity also comes challenge and it is a well documented fact that students from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) backgrounds are twice as likely to be unemployed than their white peers (Office for National Statistics, 2007).

Mentoring has proven to be a successful way of redressing the balance and offering students the opportunity to maximise their potential within the graduate labour market by developing their employability skills and competitive edge.  Our mentoring scheme is aimed at all UK domiciled undergraduates from the University of Bradford and we are confident that this inclusive approach will encourage students that feel they would benefit from the expertise of a mentor, to apply for the programme. 

 The Careers Mentoring Scheme (formerly known as the Impact Mentoring Scheme) has also received Approved Provider Status from the National Mentoring and Befriending Foundation and as such has been praised for its organisation, monitoring and the on-going support that it offers participants. 

Sources of Information on Mentoring

• This list of websites will help you find more about mentoring generally
• Read what others say about mentoring

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