Ask HN: Tips on best practices for mentors in the workplace
So the context is that I'm a Manager at a fairly boutique aviation consulting firm. We primarily hire highly experienced, long term employees from other aviation companies, but that leads us to having a fairly unbalanced workforce, in terms of not a lot of juniors and a whole lot of people nearing retirement.
Last year to combat this, I started a paid intern program. It went very well. The structure is every intern is assigned a "People Lead", or HR leader (for the purposes of the program they are all assigned to me) who works with the intern to set goals for the term, ensures they get properly tasked with a mix of boring and interesting work, and overall runs the program.
Then each intern is also assigned a "Project Mentor", who's job it is to work with the intern on the day-to-day, assigning work, reviewing work products, setting deadlines etc. This worked okay last year, but one of the gaps was that the mentors were not as prepared, and many had never been in this role before.
So what I'm hoping to ask HN for is if you have any resources on being a good mentor, advice to mentors etc, I'll be distilling it into a training presentation to train those selected to be mentors on how best to mentor, in hopes that it will improve both the intern experience, and also help train some of these extremely technical employees on some more soft skills.