Imagine mentoring as a map with many routes leading to the same destination: personal and professional growth. Some paths are long and reflective, others short and focused, but whether in a global company, a university, or a professional body, each one guides people complete their journey.
Understanding the key types of mentoring, and how to shape them around your people, culture, and objectives, is what turns direction into momentum - helping every mentoring journey reach its destination with purpose and measurable results.
Below, you'll explore the most common mentoring models - and where each one works best.
Types of Mentoring | In the Workplace | Universities & Education | Associations | Choosing the Right Mix
Common Types of Mentoring
One-to-One Mentoring
This is the most traditional and widely recognised of the types of mentoring, with one mentor and one mentee. The mentorship relationship is highly personal and built on trust. This type of mentoring is often used for long-term career development and leadership growth, where the mentee benefits from tailored advice and encouragement.
Benefits:
Personalised development
Strong accountability
Deep relationships
Challenges:
Resource-intensive to scale
Requires effective mentor / mentee matching to succeed.
Group Mentoring
Here, one mentor works with several mentees at once. Mentees benefit from the mentor’s guidance but also from peer-to-peer learning, as they share experiences with each other. This approach is efficient and builds collaborative skills.
Benefits:
Efficient use of mentor time
Fosters collaboration
Broadens perspectives
Challenges:
Harder to address individual needs
Mentors require training in group facilitation
Peer Mentoring
Peer-to-peer mentoring connects individuals at a similar job level, career stage, or study level - sometimes even across different functions or industries. It’s built on shared experiences and mutual understanding rather than hierarchy.
This type of mentoring encourages a genuine give-and-take dynamic: both participants offer advice, support one another through similar challenges, and learn from each other in a positive, productive way. Because peers are often navigating similar pressures or transitions, they’re well placed to provide empathy and practical perspective.
Benefits:
Creates a safe, equal space for discussion
Builds confidence through shared learning
Strengthens collaboration and workplace culture
Challenges:
Peers may lack the experience to offer strategic guidance
Without clear structure or ongoing nurturing, relationships can fade over time
Reverse Mentoring / Reciprocal Mentoring
Reverse mentoring - sometimes referred to as reciprocal mentoring - flips the traditional mentoring model. It’s when a less-experienced professional mentors a more experienced one - the mentor becomes the mentee, and vice versa. This type of relationship helps both sides learn from each other’s lived experiences, perspectives, and skills.
Reverse mentoring is particularly valuable for bridging generational, cultural, and digital gaps. It empowers junior employees to share insights on new technologies, workplace culture, or inclusivity, while senior professionals gain a deeper understanding of emerging trends and employee experiences.
For reverse mentoring to work well, both parties need to approach it with openness. The junior mentor must feel confident enough to offer feedback and challenge respectfully, while the senior professional must be willing to listen, ask questions, and accept areas where they may have less knowledge or understanding.
Benefits:
Builds empathy and inclusivity
Challenges outdated assumptions and hierarchies
Encourages two-way learning and cultural awareness
Challenges:
Can feel uncomfortable at first without clear programme management and preparation
Requires trust, humility, and psychological safety on both sides
E-Mentoring (Virtual Mentoring)
Delivered online, virtual mentoring removes barriers of geography and time. It’s flexible, scalable, and increasingly expected in hybrid or global organisations. Mentoring platforms also make it easier to track meetings, collect feedback, and measure outcomes.
Benefits:
Scalable
Flexible
Measurable
Challenges:
Relationships can feel less personal; mentors may need training in building rapport online.
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Mentoring in the Workplace
Workplace mentoring supports employee growth, leadership pipelines, and culture change. Common approaches include:
Onboarding Mentoring
New members of staff are paired with experienced colleagues to help them adapt quickly, learn workplace culture, and feel included. It reduces the time it takes to become effective in a new role.
Benefits:
Smoother transitions,
Boosts retention,
Builds engagement early
Challenges:
Mentors need time and guidance
Requires nurturing to avoid fading after the first few weeks
Executive Mentoring
Executive mentoring supports leaders at senior levels through confidential, strategic guidance and transitions into new roles. It often overlaps with coaching but with a longer-term relationship.
Benefits:
Sharper decision-making
Increased confidence
Personal growth
Challenges:
Finding the right mentor match
Requires careful programme management
Career Development Mentoring
Career development mentoring focuses on supporting individuals as they identify and achieve their professional goals. It may involve offering or receiving guidance around specific skills, confidence-building, or knowledge relevant to a particular role, task, or industry.
Mentors help mentees clarify objectives, recognise strengths, and explore areas for growth. Goals can be personalised through ongoing conversations - often refined after the first meeting using platform messaging or video calls.
Benefits:
Helps mentees define career direction and skill gaps
Increases confidence and motivation
Encourages self-reflection and measurable growth
Challenges:
Requires structured matching to align mentors with mentees’ ambitions
Progress can stall without regular feedback and review
Team Mentoring
Several mentors work with a team of mentees, often in project settings or cross-functional collaborations. It focuses on group outcomes and collective growth.
Benefits:
Encourages collaboration
Brings diverse perspectives
Accelerates team performance
Challenges:
Less personalised
Requires structured reporting to measure impact
Situational Mentoring
Short-term mentoring relationships built around a specific challenge or opportunity, such as preparing for a big presentation or stepping into management.
Benefits:
Targeted, practical
Time-efficient
Challenges:
Less depth
Requires agile matching to pair the right expertise quickly
Reverse Mentoring in the Workplace
As well as being a core category, reverse mentoring thrives in workplace settings - especially around diversity, equality, and inclusion. It helps leaders stay connected to evolving cultural and technological changes.
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Universities & Education
Universities use mentoring to improve student success and prepare graduates for careers. Key approaches include:
Peer Mentoring for Students
As described above, in university settings peer mentoring takes on a unique form and often supports first-year students. Peer mentoring provides reassurance and a smoother transition into university life, which can boost engagement and learning success by settling and grounding new students more quickly; making them feel part of the course and university life.
Benefits:
Reduces drop-out rates
Builds belonging
Creates leadership opportunities for mentors
Challenges:
Students are less likely to have mentoring experience, which requires training and feedback loops
Career Mentoring (Alumni)
Graduates or industry professionals support current students with career planning and employability skills.
Benefits:
Practical guidance
Networking opportunities
Industry insights
Challenges:
Requires structured matching and ongoing reporting to show results.
Group Mentoring in Education
A study group or academic cohort mentored by a senior student or faculty member.
Benefits:
Supports collaborative learning
Helps students engage with coursework
Challenges:
Group dynamics can be tricky
Mentors need strong facilitation skills
Flash / Speed Mentoring
Short, structured conversations between students and multiple mentors, often at careers events.
Benefits:
Exposure to diverse viewpoints
Efficient networking
Challenges:
Little time for depth
Requires feedback mechanisms to track outcomes
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Associations
Think of mentoring as creating ripples across a profession. One conversation leads to a breakthrough, one piece of guidance shapes a career, one connection inspires a new leader. Within associations and industry groups, those ripples build momentum; strengthening the whole community with every pairing.
Professional bodies and industry groups often run various types of mentoring to strengthen their membership and future-proof their sectors. Mentoring turns membership from something people pay for into something they actively participate in. It’s one of the clearest reasons to belong: members can give back, learn from others, and see the value of their membership come to life through personal growth and sector-wide impact.
Cross-Organisational Mentoring
Members are paired across organisations, industries, or sectors to broaden perspectives and share knowledge.
Benefits:
Networking
Benchmarking
Exposure to new practices
Challenges:
More complex programme management and matching across boundaries
Apprenticeship / Vocational Mentoring
The traditional "learn from the master" approach, where practical, hands-on skills are passed down in real time.
Benefits:
Highly effective for skills transfer
Long tradition of success
Challenges:
Labour-intensive
Requires strong reporting to demonstrate progress
Diversity Mentoring
It's easy to overlook potential when everyone in the room thinks alike. Diversity mentoring changes that - creating the conversations that reveal strengths, perspectives, and ideas that might otherwise stay unseen.
Targeted schemes designed to increase representation and leadership diversity within sectors. These programmes create visibility, challenge bias, and help organisations unlock a wider range of perspectives and experiences.
Benefits:
Drives inclusion and equal opportunity
Develops diverse future leaders and role models
Strengthens organisational culture and innovation through varied viewpoints
Challenges:
Requires careful matching to avoid tokenism and ensure meaningful pairings
Demands clear goals, regular reporting, and sustained support to demonstrate measurable impact
Formal vs Informal Mentoring
Formal mentoring programmes use structured processes for matching, training, and reporting, whereas informal mentoring grows naturally through personal networks or shared interests. Most associations and organisations find a balance between the two to reach different audiences.
Benefits:
Formal mentoring ensures accountability, consistency, and measurable outcomes
Informal mentoring feels flexible, approachable, and often easier to start
Combining both creates a more inclusive and responsive mentoring culture
Challenges:
Formal mentoring can feel rigid or administrative if over-engineered
Informal mentoring is harder to track, with variable quality and little data for programme management
Mixing both models requires clear communication so participants understand what to expect
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Choosing the Right Mix
There isn't one "best" type of mentoring. Strong programmes usually combine several: a workplace might blend onboarding with reverse mentoring, a university might mix peer and career mentoring, while a professional body might combine cross-organisational mentoring with diversity mentoring.
The key is aligning the model with your organisation's goals - and using the right tools to manage, nurture, and measure the results. That's exactly what mentoring software is designed to deliver.
Now you’ve discovered the types of Mentoring you may need...
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