Lifting The Lid On XFE Mentoring And Knowledge Exchange 

 

 

Due to popular demand, we are lifting the lid on our mentoring provision and bespoke IT platform, the X-Forces Enterprise Knowledge Exchange Hub. 

Over the last few years, we have created a peer-to-peer community and helped thousands of members of the Armed Forces family to develop and grow. 

Here are some numbers: 

• XFE has supported over 10,000 individuals 
• We have delivered over 42,800 hours of training 
• Our Knowledge Exchange Hub has over 3,000 members 

 

We kick off with an introduction entitled Mentoring: Trust And Rapport In Action. Read on… 

Mentoring lies at the very heart of the X-Forces Enterprise model for supporting entrepreneurial ambition among members of the Armed Forces community, powered by our unique Knowledge Exchange Hub. But how exactly does mentoring work? 

According to the University of Southampton, mentoring involves helping individuals to develop their career, skills and expertise, often drawing upon the mentor’s own experiences in the process. 

Mentoring is very different from managing or coaching, and it is important to know what the key skills and behaviours of a good mentor are before getting started. 

For mentoring to be successful, there must be trust and rapport between mentor and mentee. To establish this from the outset, it is a good idea to hold an informal introductory meeting to share expectations for the mentoring relationship. It is important to define the mentee’s objectives, as this will help identify the aspects of the mentor’s experience that will be most relevant, as well as clarifying the content of the sessions that follow. 

The success of a mentoring conversation depends on the quality, not the quantity of the questions asked, which should prompt the mentee to engage in some genuine self-reflection and achieve greater insight into the situations and challenges they are facing.