Build a Mentoring Program You Can Be Proud Of

Businesses often use mentoring programs to train new hires or to groom employees for advancement. But have you ever considered the benefits of using mentoring to improve your team's writing skills?

Benefits of technical writing mentors
Mentoring programs can deliver multiple benefits to your organization:

• Increased productivity: With mentoring, new hires can get up to speed more quickly, instead of making potentially costly mistakes.
  
• Longer employee retention: Mentored employees tend to stay with a company longer than those who receive no guidance. In one survey, 77 percent of companies attribute higher employee retention and performance to the existence of a mentoring program.
  
• Happier employees: Those who are mentored tend to have higher job satisfaction, which contributes to better productivity and less turnover. One reason for this is that mentoring reduces employee frustration, as employees know they have someone to turn to when they have questions or problems.

Many companies implement mentoring to reap these benefits and encourage sharing of industry-related skills and expertise. However, in terms of writing, employees are often expected to figure things out on their own.

Teaching writing skills
Mentoring programs are a great way to foster strong writing skills, as mentors don't simply correct mistakes. Mentoring teaches critical thinking skills, which are essential for clear, effective writing. Mentoring also promotes the translation of experience into knowledge.

For example, the Simon Fraser University Beedie School of Business offers one writing mentoring session per week to undergraduate students. Ideally, these students will enter the professional world with well-honed writing skills. This same approach can be applied to businesses.

• Mentors can point out problems in a document, like flow and logic.
• Mentors can help a novice writers clarify their documents.
• Mentors can evaluate planning strategies.

The perfect mentor
With a mentoring program, good writing becomes a part of your organization’s culture. New employees improve their writing, and they share the benefits with others who then continue the positive cycle.

Hurley Write is an ideal mentor, especially for companies that might lack existing writing pros in-house. With both onsite and online options, Hurley Write can help your entire team improve its writing.

In addition to our hands-on onsite classes, Hurley Write offers one-on-one attention in online courses as well. In Option 3 in all of Hurley Write’s online courses, participants receive feedback on their work and can chat with their editor while taking the course.

Whether onsite or online courses are appropriate, Hurley Write’s mentoring options don’t end there: we also offer customized classes and pre- and post-class writing assessments and coaching.  

With an expert mentor like Hurley Write, your organization will enjoy a better written product in the short term and a culture that promotes quality writing in the long term.

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