What motivated TfL to partner with One Million Mentors?
We work very closely with the Mayor of London’s New Deal for young people and support their goal to improve the lives of young Londoners. They made us aware of One Million Mentors and the brilliant work that you were doing, and we saw a parallel with how we wanted to help increase opportunities for young people.
Over the last year, we’ve really tried to highlight how mentoring fits with our organisational goals. We want to support the city that we serve, develop a future workforce with the kind of key skills that we need, and develop more meaningful engagement, linking into the Gatsby benchmarks. Going forward, with us looking at our strategic workforce plans, I think this is only going to increase: it’s no longer just ‘a nice to do’. We’re targeting the areas our offices are based in, we’ve talked about our priority school list, I think it will just go from strength to strength.
How has the mentoring experience benefited your employees and the young people involved in the programme?
For mentors, there’s the personal development, towards their career ambitions, and an opportunity to feel they are ‘giving back a little bit’ by working with young people who need additional support… But it’s also an opportunity to get to understand the perspective of a young person! The value of that is something I talk a lot about: what you get from your mentee and how you can bring it back into the workplace.
We want to help young people reach their full potential, but also to see the diverse range of careers there are at Transport for London, dispelling the perception that it’s all ‘bus drivers and train drivers’. There’s a huge variety of careers available here. Mentors help young people explore what routes they can come in to them by – showing them the breadth of opportunities and enabling them to really reach their full potential.
What are the key positives you would want to showcase about your involvement in a 1MM programme?
I think the key thing is it’s enabled us to have a wider reach with schools. We have a new priority school list, and this is enabling us to work with schools that we previously wouldn’t have been able to engage with.
And I think the full training, and the skills, that by partnering up with you we are giving to our mentors. We do have a very basic introduction for mentoring, which I think is appropriate for those who are mentoring a colleague via a cyber relationship… but it’s very different mentoring a young person outside your workplace with the kind of experiences that you may encounter with your mentees. I think that your training has really benefited us – the team of mentors that have gone through the programme has said this is one of the highlights.
