As of 13 August 2026, AI can create an employee mentoring plan.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Do it yourself

   Second choice

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your team development records, relevant internal policies and any existing mentoring materials, then remove names and unnecessary sensitive personal information.
   2. Gather the programme purpose, participant roles, development goals, mentor skills and capacity, meeting constraints, confidentiality boundaries and review measures.
   3. Paste the gathered information into the prompt, keeping each person represented by an anonymised label and marking unknown details as unknown.
   4. Ask the chatbot to produce the full plan, including the matching method, schedule, responsibilities, escalation points, review process, assumptions and missing information.
   5. Compare every proposed match, activity and success measure with the actual employee goals, mentor capacity, internal policies and available time, correcting any invented or unsuitable detail.
   6. Ask a manager or HR colleague to check the matching criteria, confidentiality boundaries, inclusion risks and escalation route before sharing the plan.
   7. Send the approved plan to participants, invite consent and practical corrections, then record the agreed matches, meeting schedule and review date in the organisation's approved system.

   Prompt

   Create an employee mentoring plan for [organisation or team] using the information below.
   
   Purpose and desired outcomes:
   [What the mentoring programme should achieve]
   
   Participants:
   [Roles, levels, teams and development needs, using anonymised labels rather than sensitive personal information]
   
   Potential mentors:
   [Skills, experience, capacity and any stated preferences]
   
   Practical constraints:
   [Duration, meeting frequency, meeting format, working locations, time available and budget]
   
   Workplace boundaries:
   [What mentoring is and is not responsible for, confidentiality rules, safeguarding or HR escalation routes, and any equality or inclusion requirements]
   
   Existing resources:
   [Training materials, internal processes, policies and development frameworks]
   
   Success measures:
   [What progress should look like and when it will be reviewed]
   
   Produce:
   1. A clear programme overview and objectives.
   2. A transparent mentoring-matching method that avoids using protected characteristics or irrelevant personal details as selection criteria.
   3. Recommended matches or match categories, explaining the work-related rationale without inventing facts.
   4. A suggested schedule, meeting agenda and activities for each stage.
   5. Responsibilities for mentees, mentors, managers and HR.
   6. Confidentiality boundaries and clear escalation points, without giving legal advice.
   7. Review points, measures of progress and a process for changing an unsuitable match.
   8. Risks, assumptions and information I still need to confirm.
   
   Use plain UK workplace English. Do not invent participant details, policies, legal requirements, outcomes or training resources. Mark assumptions clearly. Keep the plan practical and inclusive. Separate decisions that need manager or HR approval from drafting that AI can do.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.