Mentoring Blog
Mentoring and Leadership a Successful Pair
The recent announcement of the 2017 National Leadership Awards honouree is an exemplary reminder of the caliber of mentorship existing in our industry today. Alex Stringer, FCIP, CRM was awarded as an Emerging Leader in 2017.
Mentor-mentee relationships are all around us; whether mentoring through an organized program with your organization, or indirectly as a support systems to fellow colleagues, it’s a natural relationship that blossoms from trust and dedication.
If you would like more information to help enrich your current, or a future, mentoring relationship, the CIP Society offers a wealth of resources to help guide you through a successful experience with this Mentoring ADVANTAGE site. Click here to get started.
Posted by the CIP Society on 9/22/2016
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Mentoring ADVANTAGE a Resource for New Career Program
This Fall, the Insurance Institute is proud to be launching a new program for members and the industry. myCareer is a microsite featuring career maps, education pathways, information, tips and resources to help people in the industry better understand the career possibilities available and to provide roadmaps on how to get there.
myCareer aims to increase awareness of where an insurance career can take you and the education pathways, volunteer capacities and mentoring that may enhance your career prospects. The site will include career resources for goal setting, self-assessment, tip sheets and information that will be particularly helpful to those in their first five to ten years in the business.
This Mentoring ADVANTAGE site will be a great support for myCareer’s many references to the benefits of mentoring for those looking for personal, professional and career development.
The CIP Society created the Mentoring ADVANTAGE and the anticipated myCareer programs in direct response to the demographic research study recommendation that the industry put greater emphasis on retaining those currently in the industry. Together these two programs provide a wealth of information and resources to help industry professionals understand the benefits of mentoring to advancing their careers.
Click here to view our online mentoring resources. And stay tuned for the much anticipated launch of the myCareer program!
Posted by the CIP Society on 7/25/2016
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New Faces, New Plan
As post-secondary educational institutions wrap up for the school year, there will be many new and fresh faces entering the workforce throughout the summer and fall months. While welcoming these interns and first-time employees to the industry with a warm smile and great orientation programs is an excellent way to make new hires feel welcomed – mentoring is also a highly effective strategy for tapping into an organization’s own pool of experienced professionals to facilitate the transfer of knowledge, skills, ethics, and professionalism to less experienced workers.
The CIP Society created the Mentoring ADVANTAGE site to offer tools to mentors and mentees that will help them determine goals and guide these partnerships into successful relationships. This microsite provides mentors and mentees with the following benchmarks:
- Determine whether mentoring is right for you – whether you’re thinking you might benefit by being a mentee or you’re considering agreeing to be someone’s mentor;
- Determine whether you’re willing to commit to mentoring;
- Set mentoring goals;
- Establish an effective mentoring relationship;
- Maintain a mentoring relationship; and
- Get the most out of a mentoring relationship.
Click here to learn more about the benefits of mentoring.
Posted by the CIP Society on 4/25/2016
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The Advantage of Mentoring: A retention strategy for the industry
Some would say that today’s workforce challenges are a perfect storm. With two big groups of workers on the move –boomers moving into retirement and millennials entering the workforce – the workplace will never be the same again. And just as the boomers changed the workplace and changed the way we work when they entered en masse, so too are the millennials.
This excerpt was taken from the February 2016 Trends Paper, which focuses on the growing need for professional mentoring in the workplace as a tool to address the exodus of boomers and the entry of millennials within the insurance industry.
Read the full paper to gain a better sense of the implications of these demographic changes in the insurance industry workforce, and the tools and resources the Mentoring ADVANTAGE program can offer mentors, mentees, and organizations.
Posted by the CIP Society on 2/18/2016
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CIP Society webinar on becoming a great mentor
This fall 2015, the CIP Society is hosting a new webinar for CIP Society members who are currently mentors, or who through a combination of education and experience, feel ready to take on the role of a mentor. The webinar, Leadership in mentoring: Seven steps to becoming a great mentor, will provide insight into what makes a great mentor, to ensure that both mentor and mentee get the most out of their relationship. The webinar is also suitable for HR professionals looking to support mentors within their organizations.
The CIP Society hosted two webinars upon launching the mentoring ADVANTAGE site earlier this year, to help individuals navigate the various resources developed for the insurance industry. The webinars, aimed at two separate audiences – mentors and mentees, and organizations – were recorded and are available online for your viewing (please use password: mentoring).
The CIP Society also hosted a mentoring webinar as part of our 15th anniversary programming in June 2014. Selected as ‘member’s choice,’ the webinar focused on the benefits of mentoring relationships and the differences between mentoring and other types of professional relationships, such as coaching, training and role modeling. This webinar was also recorded and is available online (please use password: mentor).
Based on our experience with our mentoring audiences, we became aware that many of our Society members are interested in becoming mentors, or require extra support in their current roles as mentors. This upcoming webinar meets the needs of mentors specifically, and will cover how to help mentors:
1. Be professional/credible and create a safe environment for mentees
2. Set and achieve goals with mentees
3. Share experiences, resources and networks
4. Ask open questions
5. Challenge mentees
6. Guide mentees
7. Evaluate mentoring relationships
If you are a member looking to give back to the community, gain personal satisfaction from sharing your experiences, and increase your self-awareness, we encourage you to join this webinar. Likewise, if you know an HR professional passionate about mentoring, please pass the link along. Hope to “see” you live on September 22.
Posted by the CIP Society on 7/30/2015
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So what can mentoring do for our industry at this critical time?
The benefits of mentoring are many. Successful relationships can help instill confidence in both mentors and mentees, and can help cultivate professionalism and ethics. They can provide an opportunity to get a second (or third) opinion on complicated work issues and/or career advice, and can help professionals from different departments in organizations and/or different areas of insurance get to know what others do and how all the pieces fit together. Instead of working in silos, it allows industry professionals to see the big picture, a perspective that’s very important in an industry as vast and
complicated as ours.
In addition, mentoring can actually help organizations attract and retain talent by helping to spread the word about the varied career paths in the industry, especially lesser known internal (lateral) paths. It can help employees feel more engaged and valued, which can help increase job satisfaction. And finally, it can help with succession planning and ensuring that organizations develop their future leaders internally and over time.
Posted by the CIP Society on 6/4/2015
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Why is mentoring so important for the insurance industry, now more than ever?
The CIP Society has been talking about mentoring for some time, but the topic has become especially timely in light of the big workplace changes facing the industry. The Institute’s most recent demographic research shows that while the industry’s workforce is both younger and more aligned with Canada’s labour force now than it was in 2007, we have not yet experienced the expected (and inevitable) retirement wave. In fact, the maximum numbers show that up to 28% of the workforce may leave the industry in the next 5 to 8 years.
One strategy for ensuring that all that knowledge and years of experience don’t retire with the mature workers is mentoring. The good news is that we can start to prepare ourselves for when they do.
What do mentees hope to gain from a mentoring relationship?
As Drew Collins says in the video segment below: “Anyone - any young person - entering into a new industry wants a path: they want a career progression path, they want an education path and they want an experiential path and the Insurance Institute does a great job of building an education path for people you come into the industry. There is a defined path of CIP to the FCIP - on that progression to really build your technical knowledge and leadership skills through the FCIP program, but you need to augment that with experience and the experience can be earned on your own from your own personal experience, but you can really ramp up that learning curve by taking things away from other people 's experiences, whether good or bad, so avoiding some of the mistakes that may have been made or pursuing similar paths that they had where they had success.”
Carla Blackmore, Chair of the Mentor Task Force and Established Leader, along with Drew Collins, Emerging Leader, put the importance of mentoring into context with the current challenges in the insurance industry’s workplaces.
Posted by the CIP Society on 3/31/2015
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Welcome to the new site
When we started working on this program in the fall of 2013, we already knew that individuals and organizations in the industry recognize the benefits of mentoring relationships. But we also knew that both formal and informal relationships could use a little support – and that the key to getting the most out of mentoring was making use of appropriate tools and resources to focus goals and monitor outcomes.
Mentoring in the insurance industry
Our mentoring resources have been developed to specifically meet the demands of the insurance industry; we’ve worked with members of the community, including industry leaders and HR representatives, to ensure that the tools and information available on the site are relevant to you and your employers.
“Our mission is to enable people employed in the financial services business to achieve their performance potential and to maximize their intellectual development. Mentoring is a strategy to achieving this outcome. We believe these new tools and resources will help enable and encourage effective mentoring among our stakeholders and members.”
- Peter Hohman, President & CEO, The Insurance Institute
On the importance of mentoring
The Chair of the Mentoring Task Force and Established Leader, Carla Blackmore, and Established Leader, Ross Totten, speak to the importance of mentoring and this program.
Posted by the CIP Society on 2/17/2015