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This is such a short perspective on why the world needs us, why the world actually needs professional mentoring systems and why this is being done now?

Individual perspective

Mentorship is beneficial for the individual. For the mentor and mentee it means faster personal growth, quicker solution to personal challenges and obstacles, better relationships and feeling supported and thus a happier life. In addition you get to experience mutual learning and thus an enhanced culture of collaborative growth and also great mutual listening, where people sit and listen to each other across generations and build trust and grow respect because they grow their understanding on an individual level.

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Societal Perspective

This is a perspective from the society as a whole.A brief look at this situation: This year ,2020, the population of Germany will look like never before. The person with the highest birth rate will be at 58 years old and that is the majority. Mentorship is relevant and important to this kind of demographic pyramid because mentorship is the only process that is able to systematically pass on experience from seniors to juniors. We still have a lot of seniors in society and we have very few juniors.There is nothing we can do about the very fact that all the experience and knowledge will leave the workforce very soon, and for some companies this will actually be an existential problem, so we will have very few people who are able to do the job and taking responsibility, and pretty much a challenge to society as a whole, and we won’t be able to stop the trend.However, we can accelerate the transfer of experience with know-how values and mentoring is the only process that can do this on the job because you can study for anything else , but it doesn’t get you to learn from the experienced people who are on the job.

As a small comparison the population of sub-saharan Africa that has a billion people in total, has mainly young people, where the median age is 18 years while Asia has 31 as the median age and Europe has 42 as the median age.
The world’s oldest population is Monaco, followed by Japan then Germany. Hence from this we can see that Germany has a problem from a global perspective. This is compared to Niger, Mali, Uganda from Africa that have the world’s youngest population.

Cooperate Perspective

As biz4d we are mainly supporting coorporate to build mentorship programs. The main question being how does this translate into a business model for a coorporation? We already have some companies that are losing about 30% of their workforce due to age and the next 10 years this will be an existential problem for many companies especially as the turnover of the young people is increasing at the same time.Older people used to stay up to 30 years in one company , younger people don’t and younger people are harder to find.Those who have an advantage are those who act and prepare early. Quick wins for a good mentorship program are increased quality of working results,retention of your best people, efficiency of learning and development,improved communication like employer branding, it reduces burn-out, reduces loss of knowledge to your competitors and also reduces personell turn-over.

Some of the expected results include, increased personal commitment from employees, you also discover talents faster because you listen to your best people, you learn faster where specific talents are and how you can better utilize them. In addition your new managers become productive in their new roles, you have great cost-savings since mistakes already made previously by the seniors are repeated less frequently because experience is passed on. The already built up experience knowledge is multiplied efficiently,effectively and practically.Experienced employees receive new inspiration and develop further because they listen to the young and get new ideas on how they can develop. Experience and knowledge receive greater visibility and respect within the organization.

For many companies in Europe their survival is pegged on having a structured and accelerated mentoring processes. This feeds into our vision as biz4d (Business for Development) that includes personal development where you develop your mentees and your mentors, institutional or organizational development that is you improve your business cases because you develop your people by connecting the young and the old and you improve innovation, retation and ultimately this is great for global development as we are able to build trust and relationships. There is a sense of urgency for mentorship to be taken up.