Support UoB students as a mentor

Mentoring is a rewarding experience for you to help someone progress and achieve their full potential for their future career.

Careers Network's mentoring programmes connect students and recent graduates with industry professionals (alumni, non-alumni and staff members) to engage in a 1-2-1 mentorship over a 6 month period. Our mentors are from a wide range of career sectors and backgrounds who kindly volunteer their time to our programmes.

You can sign up at any time to be a mentor, and the next round of The Careers Network Mentoring Scheme will open to student applications from 01/09/2025. We expect to be able to confirm matches in early November, for 6-month mentorships lasting from November to May. A second ‘Spring’ round of the mentoring scheme will also be running later in the year if we’re not able to match you this Autumn round.

The role of a mentor

As a mentor on our programme your role is to support your mentee by having career focussed discussions that develop the mentee to explore new opportunities and build their confidence. By sharing your experiences and advice this increases the mentees awareness, knowledge and insight, helping them to gain a clearer direction for achieving their career aspirations.

Time commitment

We ordinarily ask our mentors to volunteer one hour each month over the course of the scheme (6 months). However, this is flexible and something we encourage you to discuss with your mentee during your first meeting.

Mentor training

Once you have registered as a mentor, you will receive access to our online training course which provides useful resources to help structure your mentorship.

Communication methods

We recommend meeting face to face where possible but understand this may not be feasible depending on availability and location. Alternatively, you may look to use virtual channels instead such as Zoom, Skype, Teams etc. We encourage you to agree how your future mentoring meetings will take place during your initial meeting and how you will communicate with one another in between meetings (e.g. the frequency and format).

Support

Our mentoring team are on-hand to offer any advice or additional support during the mentorship and will check-in with both parties at various points.

The mentoring journey

1. To join the scheme you will be asked to register via our online mentoring platform. Once on the platform you will create a mentor profile and answer various questions around your experiences and expertise.

2. You will be provided with access to our online mentor training course to help prepare you for your mentoring relationship.

3. Based on the information you have provided through your mentor profile, our Mentoring Team will match you to a suitable mentee and connect you with one another to kick-start the mentorship.

4. Throughout the mentorship (typically 6 months) our Mentoring Team will keep in touch to make sure everything is progressing smoothly and offer any additional support, should you need it.

Please note, the onus is placed on the mentee to drive the relationship by arranging meetings and suggesting discussion topics to ensure the conversations are mentee focused.

How to register

To get started, please create an account on UoB Mentoring Connect.

To then confirm you are available to be a mentor, please complete your registration onto the Careers Network Mentoring Scheme – as follows:

Click ‘Mentoring programmes’ along the taskbar at the top of the screen and then click ‘Join’ to become a Mentor.
Read and agree to the information provided to join the scheme. Please complete all the sections as fully as possible, as your answers will help us to find a suitable match.

Next mentoring cycle

The next Careers Network Mentoring Scheme will be running from November 2025. If you complete your registration and we successfully match you, we hope to be able to share your mentee’s details by the first week of November 2025. If we are unable to match you this time, our next scheme will commence in Spring 2026.

If you have any questions or need any support, please contact mentoring@contacts.bham.ac.uk and our Mentoring Team will get back to you as soon as possible.

Contact our Mentoring Team

For any further questions, you can contact our Mentoring Team via mentoring@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

You can also access our mentor FAQs webpage.