Essential Features For an Online Mentoring Platform

Nowadays, people are eager to upgrade their skill sets to survive in this competitive world and for that, they need good mentorship and proper guidance from experienced professionals. Hence, it is very important for them to reach out to those who have spent numerous years in their respective field and are willing to share their knowledge.

However, searching for a mentor who is an industry expert can be quite a task. Similarly, finding a well-deserving mentee can be difficult too. Hence, this challenge brings up a new opportunity for budding entrepreneurs to connect both sides effectively. By building an online mentoring platform they can help connect experienced mentors with mentees.

Types of Mentoring

We can see a huge scope in the online mentoring business space, but before tapping onto its potential let us see the different types of mentoring prevalent in the industry.

Individual

Also known as one-on-one mentoring, where a mentor with desirable experience and expertise, guide, and help a mentee achieve his goals. All points and feedback are discussed privately in face-to-face sessions.

Group

This type of mentoring involves a mentor guiding several mentees in a group. Here mentors can reach and guide more mentees in a shorter span of time. This is useful where no individual attention is required and the same skill is to be taught to every individual in the group.

Collective

In this type of mentoring, a group of mentors would guide and share knowledge with a group of mentees. This type of mentoring is mostly popular in enterprises.

Necessary Features for an Online Mentoring Platform

Before you start building your own online mentoring platform, there are certain necessary features that you should consider for the success of your platform.

Matching Algorithm

A mentor and mentees’ match is neither made in heaven nor is it guesswork. Albeit, it requires an effective matching algorithm to read user profiles and make suggested recommendations. A well-organized mentoring platform allows mentees to choose mentors according to their requirements, and in turn, mentors can add relevant particulars about themselves on their profiles to make that search easy for them.

In case, mentees don’t want to choose their mentors themselves, the admin can assign a mentor to them. Correct matching will ensure satisfaction at the mentees’ end and will increase trustability on your platform.

Interactive Tools

A well-established mentoring platform must have good communicative tools to facilitate seamless communication between mentors and apprentices. They should be able to interact in real time via video call or chat. They should be able to easily collaborate with each other by sharing links, and documents, on the platform.

Furthermore, features like a virtual whiteboard, screen sharing/recording, chat support, etc. are essential for any online mentoring platform.

Multilingual

If you wish to serve globally, this feature can help you get an edge over your competitors. This feature can help you break the language barrier and open opportunities for you to serve and mentor participants worldwide.

Progress Monitoring and Tracking Reports

This could be an important feature for mentors and mentees to evaluate the progress of the mentorship program. As accountability is essential for any training program and mentees’ success, monitoring and tracking reports that can show the progress of mentees in the form of graphs or in scores can be an added advantage.

Through these tools, mentees can assess their performance and can also identify weak areas where more support is needed.

Ratings and Reviews

Ratings and reviews can play an important role in improving the transparency of your platform. Mentees can provide feedback about their mentors and further new students can decide whether they want to hire a particular mentor or not. The rating of mentors can also be shown on their profile page to increase their accountability. Hence, we can say that ratings and reviews play an important role in client satisfaction.

As we have discussed essential features that should be included on the mentoring platform, let us see how you can start building your own online mentoring platform.

Building an Online Mentoring Platform

An online mentoring platform can majorly be developed in two ways:

1. Custom development
2. White-label solution

Custom Development

In custom development, you need to hire web developers and designers who will custom-build your platform from scratch keeping your business needs in mind. This solution offers high scalability and efficiency for your platform. Custom development allows you to fully reflect your brand identity and add personalized small touches to your user interface.

The main drawback of a custom-developed solution is that it takes a lot of time and money in the development process as the platform will be built from scratch.

White-Label Solution

A better alternative to custom development is to purchase a white-label solution that can cater to the needs of your business. As it is a pre-made solution, it is quite affordable. One of the major advantages of white-label solutions is that your platform is ready to launch within 2-3 days. And, as the platform developed from this solution is tested several times, there are fewer chances of any errors or bugs.

The expenses saved using white-label software can be realigned in a more effective way. You can use that budget in marketing your business to attract more users and eventually increase the profits and ROI. Moreover, investing in white label software eliminates the need to control the process of product implementation and you do not have to spend time and effort on project management, thereby saving a lot of time and effort.

Yo!Coach is one such popular solution that allows you to build your platform in a short period of time. It is white-label software that is fully customizable. It is cost-effective, highly scalable, and has all the basic and advanced features needed for establishing an online mentoring platform effectively.

This solution provides lifetime ownership with no recurring fee and is pre-integrated with popular video conferencing and payment APIs. There is no one size fits all choice when choosing the approach to build your mentoring platform. You should make your decision based on your unique business requirements.

Bottom Line

With the advent of new technologies and tools, we can see a gradual shift of people towards digital modes of mentorship, where they can not only attend classes according to their convenience but also can be guided by experienced mentors. Mentoring platforms exist because there is a need for such platforms in the market.

Facilitating both mentors and mentees with a feature-rich online mentoring platform can help turn your mentoring business into a success.