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You said yes. Someone asked you to mentor them - a colleague, a graduate, a member of your association - and saying yes felt good. You've been around. You know things. Of course you can help.
Then the first session lands in your calendar, and a quieter thought arrives: what are you actually meant to do in there?
Or maybe you're on the other side of it. You run the programme. You've recruited the mentors, you've matched them up, and someone has just asked you the question you didn't quite have an answer for - how are our mentors supposed to learn how to do this? Nodding enthusiastically and hoping experience carries them through is, you suspect, not a plan.
Both questions have the same root, and it's worth saying plainly before we go any further: mentoring is a skill, not a personality type. The idea that good mentors are simply “naturals” - warm, wise people who were always going to be good at it - is the first thing to let go of. Naturals are rare, and waiting for them is no way to run a programme. Mentoring is learnable, and most people who think they'd be hopeless at it turn out to be quietly excellent once they understand what the job actually is.
Which brings us to the part nobody tells you.
Jump to a section:
Why giving advice is the wrong instinct | Resisting the urge to fix it for them | Giving the mentoring relationship a shape | Knowing what mentoring is - and isn't | How you actually learn to mentor | Helping your mentors learn to mentor | Quick checklist: how to learn mentoring
1. The advice trap
Most new mentors get the same thing wrong first, and it's an honest mistake. They assume mentoring means giving advice. Their job, as they understand it, is to have been there, work out what the mentee should do, and hand over the answer they wish someone had given them at that age. So they come prepared. They walk in ready to tell.
And it feels generous. It feels like exactly what you signed up for.
The problem is that advice the mentee didn't arrive at themselves rarely sticks. You can hand someone the perfect solution and watch it slide straight off, because they haven't done the thinking that makes a solution feel like theirs. Worse, every time you supply the answer, you've quietly trained them to come back for the next one - and made the relationship about your wisdom rather than their growth.
CIAT
Their mentors work from a built-in learning and development toolkit - part of why the programme runs largely on its own within a not-for-profit's limited resources.
Here's the shift that changes everything: your experience isn't a script to read out. It's the thing that lets you ask a better question. The mentor who's been through three failed product launches doesn't say “here's what you should do.” They say “what's your gut telling you about why this one's wobbling?” - and then they wait, because they know from those three launches exactly how much is hiding behind that question.
That's the whole craft in miniature. Less telling, more drawing out. It's slower, it's quieter, and it feels, at first, like you're not doing enough. You are. The listening and the questions are the work - and if you want the practical techniques for doing them well, from active listening to the open-ended questions that get a mentee talking, PLD has a whole guide to the in-session toolkit. This piece is about the bigger shift those techniques sit inside.
What a good programme gives its mentors: the asking-not-telling shift, taught up front rather than discovered months in. PLD builds mentor training and guidance into the platform so it's there to lean on from session one.
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2. Resist the rescue
There's a moment that catches every new mentor off guard. The mentee is describing their problem, and somewhere in the middle of it you see the answer. Clearly. Completely. It's sitting right there, and they can't see it, and the urge to reach over and hand it to them is almost physical.
Don't.
This is the advice trap wearing a more flattering disguise. It doesn't feel like showing off now - it feels like kindness. They're stuck, you can help, why would you make them struggle? But the struggle is the point. The mentee who works their own way to the answer, even slowly, even clumsily, has learned something they'll keep. The one you rescued has learned that the way out of being stuck is to wait for someone cleverer to turn up.
Ascential
One mentee described how mentoring helped them see their career from different angles and challenge themselves in ways they never had - the result of being stretched, not rescued.
It helps to remember that the thing in front of you usually isn't the thing. Someone says they can't decide whether to apply for the promotion; the real issue is they don't believe they'd get it. Rescue the surface problem - “of course you should apply!” - and you've solved nothing, because you never reached what was actually holding them. Sit with them in it a little longer, ask what's really making them hesitate, and the genuine obstacle surfaces. That's the one worth working on.
So when you feel the rescue urge, treat it as a signal rather than an instruction. It usually means you've understood the problem - which is exactly the moment to ask a question instead of answering one. What have you already considered? What's stopping the option you keep circling back to? You're not withholding help. You're giving the more durable kind.
What turns the instinct into a habit: reflection after sessions, not just preparation before them. A dedicated platform gives mentors structured prompts to review how a session went - so holding back becomes practice, not luck.
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3. Give the relationship a shape
Plenty of mentoring relationships don't fail dramatically. They just fade. The first meeting goes well, the second is pleasant, the third gets rescheduled, and by the fourth nobody's quite sure what they're for. No fallout, no complaint - just a slow drift into nothing, and two people privately deciding it wasn't really for them.
That drift is almost always a structure problem, not a chemistry problem. Warm, willing people still need something to hang the relationship on, and the good news is it takes very little.
Start with a proper first conversation - not a session, a conversation. Before any goals or action points, the two of you work out how this is going to run: how often you'll meet, for how long, who books it, what happens between meetings, and what's off the table. Five minutes of “here's how we'll do this” prevents most of the awkwardness that sinks early relationships, because the mentee stops wondering whether they're allowed to ask, and you stop wondering whether you're overstepping.
The Salvation Army
The L&D team can track every stage of every coaching relationship in real time - the kind of oversight that catches a fading relationship before it disappears.
Then give the mentee a couple of goals that are genuinely theirs. Not the ones you think they should have - the ones they'll actually show up for. A relationship pointed at something the mentee cares about has a reason to keep going; a relationship that's just regular meetings has nothing holding it together when the calendar gets busy.
Settle on a cadence that's realistic rather than ambitious. Monthly that actually happens beats fortnightly that collapses by week three. And let the mentee own the booking - it's a small thing, but it keeps the ownership where it belongs and spares you becoming the person chasing them.
And - the part almost everyone forgets - plan an ending. Mentoring relationships aren't meant to run forever, but without an agreed finish line they tend to either fizzle out guiltily or limp on past their usefulness. Agreeing up front that you'll review where things stand after, say, six months gives the whole thing a shape: a beginning, a middle, and a clean, deliberate close you can both feel good about. An ending you planned is a success. An ending that just happened feels like a failure, even when the work was good.
What a dedicated programme makes easier: the shape you'd otherwise impose by willpower. PLD sets and tracks goals against a personal learning plan, schedules sessions in the platform rather than letting them drift out of inboxes, and keeps progress visible end to end.
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4. Know what you're not
A lot of new mentors quietly drift into being something else, usually without noticing. The relationship is going well, the mentee trusts them, and before long they're solving operational problems like a manager, or wading into personal distress like a counsellor, or running structured skills sessions like a trainer. All well-meant. All slightly off the job.
It's worth holding a few clean lines in your head. A manager is accountable for someone's output; a mentor isn't, and that lack of accountability is exactly what makes a mentor safe to be honest with. A coach typically works to a defined performance objective over a set engagement, often without needing to have done the mentee's job; a mentor brings lived experience of the path the mentee is on, and tends to range more widely. A counsellor is trained to help with psychological and emotional difficulty - which a mentor is not, however caring they are.
East London NHS Foundation Trust
They run mentoring, coaching and reverse mentoring as three distinct programmes on a single platform - the difference between the roles built into the structure.
That last line is the one that matters most. When a mentee brings something that's genuinely about their mental health or wellbeing, the skilled move isn't to roll up your sleeves and help - it's to recognise you're past the edge of your remit and point them gently towards someone qualified. Knowing what you're not is how you protect both of you: it keeps the mentee getting the right kind of help, and it keeps you from carrying something you were never meant to hold.
None of this means staying rigidly in a box. Good mentoring naturally brushes up against all of these. The skill is noticing when you've crossed from mentoring into something that needs a different person, and having the honesty to say so.
What a well-run programme makes clear from day one: where mentoring ends and managing, coaching or counselling begins. PLD even runs mentoring and coaching as distinct programmes on one platform, so the boundary is built into the structure rather than left to each mentor to police.
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5. So how do you actually learn it?
Here's the honest answer, and it's the one the course-and-certificate industry would rather you didn't hear: you don't learn mentoring by reading about mentoring. Reading helps - you're doing it now - but it's preparation, not the thing itself. Mentoring is learned the way most worthwhile skills are learned, by doing it and paying attention to how it went.
Which means three things, really.
You learn by practising. Your first mentee gets a less polished mentor than your fifth, and that's simply how it works - there's no shortcut that lets you skip the early awkwardness. The mentors who improve are the ones who treat each session as a rep, not a performance, and who notice afterwards what they'd do differently. A two-minute reflection after a meeting - where did I jump in too soon? what question landed well? - does more for your development than any amount of theory.
Vision Action
A mentor on their remote programme said it gave them the confidence to use new or different techniques - learning on a supported platform, seen from the inside.
You learn by remembering you've been here before. Almost everyone has been mentored by someone, formally or not - a manager who asked the right question, a senior colleague who let you work it out. You already know what good felt like from the receiving end. That instinct is more reliable than you think, and worth drawing on directly: what did the people who helped you most actually do?
And you learn by not being left to wing it. This is where good programmes earn their keep. Being handed a mentee and a vague brief is how most people end up inventing the role from scratch, badly. The programmes that produce good mentors give them something to stand on - guidance, resources, a structure that carries the relationship - so the mentor can concentrate on the conversation instead of on whether they're doing it right. If you want the practical in-session methods to draw on as you practise, PLD's guide to mentoring techniques is the toolkit to keep open.
What turns experience into skill: support around the doing. A dedicated platform surrounds mentors with the resources and structure that make each session count - so practice actually improves them, rather than just ageing them.
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6. If you run the programme
Everything above is written for the mentor. But if you're the one running the programme, you've probably been reading it through a different lens - because “how do our mentors learn to do this?” is your problem to solve, not theirs, and the honest reading of this whole piece is that mentors learn best when they're not left to learn alone.
That's the part a lot of programmes get wrong. They recruit good people, match them up, run a launch session, and then quietly assume the relationships will look after themselves. Some do. Most drift - not because the mentors were poor, but because willing people were handed a hard skill and no scaffolding, and asked to improvise.
The fix isn't more training days. It's building the support into the programme so it's there every week, not just at launch: clear guidance on what mentoring is and isn't, goals the pairs actually work towards, sessions that get scheduled rather than forgotten, reflection that turns experience into skill, and visibility for you over which relationships are thriving and which need a nudge. Do that, and “how do our mentors learn?” stops being a worry - the programme teaches them as they go.
This is exactly what PLD is built to carry. Inspire Mentoring leant on PLD's mentor training resources to get volunteers confident and effective working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Royal Academy of Engineering's programme manager was, in her words, fully equipped to manage the platform and onboard mentors and mentees swiftly - with PLD providing tried-and-tested ideas for promotion and ongoing support alongside. The scaffolding does the teaching, so the admin isn't fielding “what am I meant to do?” one mentor at a time.
If you're at the earlier stages - working out what the programme should be, or getting it off the ground - that's a related but distinct job, and there's a guide for each: designing a mentoring programme for the strategic side, and setting up a mentoring programme for getting it live. Learning to mentor is what happens once the programme exists - and the better the programme is built, the more naturally that learning takes care of itself.
See how the platform supports mentors and admins alike →
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How to learn mentoring: a quick checklist
If you're about to start, keep this somewhere you'll see it before your first session:
Drop the idea that you're there to give answers - your job is to draw them out, not hand them over.
Ask before you tell - turn your experience into a better question.
Resist the rescue - when you can see the answer, that's your cue to ask one, not give one.
Listen properly - and pick up the techniques that make it easier.
Agree how it'll run before you get into the work - cadence, who books, what's off-limits.
Set goals the mentee owns - and a realistic meeting rhythm.
Plan the ending - a deliberate close, not a slow fade.
Know your limits - signpost on when something needs a manager, coach or counsellor.
Reflect after each session - two minutes on what worked and what you'd change.
Keep going - your fifth mentee gets a better mentor than your first.
One last thing
Go back to that first session in your calendar - the one that prompted the quiet panic. Here's what it helps to know walking into it: you don't need the answers. You never did. The mentee in front of you isn't hoping you'll solve their life; they're hoping someone will take them seriously enough to ask the right questions and listen to what comes back. That, you can do today.
Everything else - the structure, the boundaries, the instinct for when to push and when to wait - is learned the way it's always learned: by turning up, paying attention, and getting a little better each time. The mentors who are brilliant at it now were exactly where you are once, wondering what on earth they were meant to do in there. They just started. So can you.
And if you're building the programme they'll mentor within, the kindest thing you can do for them is make sure they're never doing it alone. That's the part PLD is built for.
