Mentorship?

Often, our training strategy is to pass a new hire over to a "mentor." I guess the hope is that this "mentor" will properly train and guide our new employee into becoming a successful part of our organizational team.

Two problems.

First, many of these “mentors” have no teaching ability. In my years running a large production facility I can recall maybe ten of my employees I thought actually did an efficient job at training new hires. (10 out of 100+ over the years) This is not a criticism of the other 90+ people. Most skilled production people are not skilled teachers.

Second, some of the very people we expect to train our new employees are territorial and withhold information to protect their job security. Doesn't mean they are terrible people, just following human nature.

This is not to say that your employees should not be involved in the training process, just that you need to have a knowledge management strategy to assist in an efficient training process. We developed a "Thomas University" textbook many years ago to provide new hires a list of definitions, questions, and projects. New hires went through a brief orientation and then assigned to various mentors throughout the store who I felt were qualified to help the new hire answer the questions in the textbook.

After following a detailed plan through each section the new hire took a written and oral test. I used these tests to not only insure they understood the necessary knowledge, but also that my "mentors" where sharing the correct information. Whenever the new hire told me the wrong answer, I'd ask them where they got the information and then retrained the "mentor." Even mentor's need followup training.

There are many studies on how much money it costs to assimilate a new hire into a productive employee. Thousands! Develop a knowledge management program so you can protect your valuable investment.