Online learning has reached a new level in recent years, and various mentoring platforms have played a significant role. They allow people of all ages to find specialists who can teach them the necessary skills. Today, creating a mentoring platform would be a great startup because demand exceeds supply. Explore this article to learn main steps to create a mentoring app that stands out.
Main Advantages of Mentoring Apps
Mentorship is a learning process that can also be accompanied by counseling and support in all matters, including psychological support. Most companies today use mentoring to train new employees. Mentoring platform brings several benefits:
- Professional support on all issues. The mentor’s expertise ensures that any problems that arise during the training are quickly and efficiently resolved.
- Multiple mentors. You can attract more users with a large selection of mentors from different specialties.
- Personalized Approach. The mentor’s professionalism allows you to provide users with the best quality of service. This way, the app becomes profitable for both mentees and you.
Mentoring application mechanism
Despite the possible individual differences, all mentoring applications work similarly. So, the mentees register in it, then they indicate what kind of specialist they want to find and what goals to achieve. In turn, the mentor has to perform several tasks:
- Reveal the mentee’s potential
- Provide theoretical material and practical tasks
- Motivate and support psychologically
- Set goals and help achieve them
- Give advice and recommendations
Types of mentorship
Several types of mentoring are most common today:
- Individual mentoring. The mentor works with a mentee tete-a-tete.
- Group mentoring. In this case, the mentor works with a group that studies the same subject and has the same goals. For example, this method is used to improve employees’ skills in the same department.
- Collective mentoring. A group of mentors works together with a group of mentees.
The most popular is individual mentoring, as it provides the highest level of service. So if you want to create your application, you should focus on this type.
Launching a Mentoring Platform: Crucial Steps
Before you move on to developing your platform, you should determine some details and go through essential steps that will help launch the project successfully.
Define the goal
The first thing you should do is determine what the primary purpose of your platform should be. Imagine yourself as a mentee and consider what criteria you would choose for a mentoring app.
Select areas to be studied
It’s worth focusing on the fields of most interest to ensure the app’s popularity. For example, IT training is in high demand today. Psychology, marketing, management, etc., are also popular. To make the right choice, you can do market research, for example, study job sites.
Provide the right structure
Each mentoring application must include three roles: mentor, mentee, and mentoring program manager. The manager will establish communication between the other participants, explain the rules, and help solve technical problems.
Organize matching
The mentor profile should be filled with all relevant information so mentees can select the best specialists. It’s also worth adding the automatic choice or admin’s help if users want to avoid picking.
Create effective rules
Besides the standard agreements, you should also outline the communication rules, schedule, duration of lessons, etc. With correct management, training will be more effective.
Remember to pay attention to feedback. Collecting it, you can constantly improve the app to keep it at a high level.
Must-Have Features for Mentoring App
The applications and platforms for mentoring are very diverse and can have unique features that enhance user experience. However, there is a specific set of essential elements. These include:
Matching. The mentoring app needs a built-in algorithm to select mentors based on criteria, which is extremely important for mentoring apps.
History. This feature will help track progress, passed materials, and other data.
Forum. Here users will be able to share information, discuss successes, leave feedback on the work of mentors, and so on.
Push notifications. They can remind the user about the beginning of a lesson, notify them when they get their results, and much more.
Chat. Helps mentors/mentees communicate with each other and with the platform administration.
Calls. In addition to chat, practical training involves video calls. You can implement this feature using third-party APIs or create a video call app for your mentoring platform.
Ratings. The rating system estimates the mentor’s quality of work and professionalism, allowing mentees to choose the specialists with the highest scores.
In-app payments. Mentees pay for services and subscriptions. Moreover, this is the most popular way to monetize the mentoring app. You can charge for services monthly or once a year.
Also, you can add any other features, such as implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Machine Learning (ML), and more.
Summarizing
Thanks to the growing popularity of mentoring platforms, creating your own can bring you many benefits. What’s more, you don’t have to do the development work. Instead, find a reliable software provider to help you do market research and take your project from raw idea to launch. Then, start creating a mentoring app to get ahead of the competition
