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Written by John McClaran

Using mentoring, eVerge Group links employees with experienced professionals for career development in their consulting jobs. An eVerge Group mentor facilitates a consultant’s personal and professional growth by sharing knowledge and insights that have been learned through years of experience.

The two main goals of the eVerge Group mentoring program are to improve connectivity and to increase an employee’s speed to competence. Employees of the eVerge Group work at diverse locations around the world and are largely reliant on technology to connect with staff and fellow employees at headquarters. Mentoring puts a human face on technology. Mentors are used to facilitate greater connectivity between our consultants and headquarters staff as well as between remotely-located consultants who because of geographic differences may otherwise never get the opportunity to collaborate. Mentors are the” linking pins” in the organization. They facilitate connections and communication up and down the chain, and work to knit together an efficient, homogenous corporate culture despite the distributed nature of the enterprise.

The second goal is to increase an employee’s speed to competence.  This means that an employee is not needlessly  struggling in any endeavor; be it new consultants trying to orient themselves to the company, a consultant needing specialized training and instruction, or a junior consultant looking for career guidance. A mentor is assigned to each employee to ensure that they can fulfill their career development needs in the most efficient manner possible. Our mentoring network is designed to facilitate our consultants’ success by improving connectivity and ensuring that no one struggles to fulfill their career aspirations.

The mentoring program consists of three basic components designed to support the two primary goals of the program. A 90-day structured mentoring program, a long-term individual self-development program and a social networking component.

The 90-day structured mentoring program is designed for new hires or those seeking to master a specific skill or training program in a relatively short period of time. The key to this program is the Individual Development Plan (IDP), which is essentially a contract between the mentor and mentee centered on specific learning objectives and desired outcomes.  Through a series of regularly scheduled meetings over 90 days the employee works with the mentor toward successful fulfillment of the goals and objectives agreed to in the IDP.

The next component is individual self-development. This involves an ongoing relationship between a mentor and mentee related to longer-term career goals and individual development of the competencies needed to be successful in consulting jobs at eVerge Group. The IDP is used to track and record an employee’s self-development activities and as a means for the mentor to stay in touch with an employee’s development efforts over time.  Meetings between the mentor and mentee in this program are less frequent and formal but nonetheless for the mentee, it means an ongoing relationship with a person who is genuinely interested in facilitating his or her personal and professional development.

The third component is social networking. As an organization of geographically dispersed teams, eVerge Group believes that the power of social networking in the workplace will greatly enhance our ability to handle any challenge. It improves our ability to organize and empower each individual in the company to collaborate across the enterprise faster, farther, and deeper than ever. At eVerge Group, we have embraced this technology as a perfect complement to our organizational structure.  We have an active group site on LinkedIn where employees from across the company collaborate and share ideas.  With the coming implementation of our new Fusion Human Capital Management application, we will be taking workplace social networking to the next level.   Fusion provides us with an in-house social networking application that will greatly enhance our ability to facilitate our employee’s personal and professional development and their ability to contribute to the company’s continued success.

Taken as a whole the mentoring program is designed to foster a culture of continuous learning, where every employee is supported and encouraged to become their very best. It is also representative of the recognition and value placed by the company on its employees and its commitment to ensure that we train and retain the most highly skilled consultants in the industry.

About the author: John McClaran has been involved in employee training and development for over twenty years. He is currently working for eVerge Group on a variety of initiatives and projects in support of the Human Resources and Marketing Departments.