The venue:
Theatre 4, Learning Technologies Conference 2022
The speakers:
- Nicola Cronin, our very own Head of Content and expert in all things Guider.
- Naomi Boachie-Ansah, Clyde & Co’s Digital Design Lead.
- Guy Wilkins, Clyde & Co’s Senior Digital Learning and Platforms Manager.
The seminar:
Learning Technologies brings together organisational learning and tech for learning at work in a blockbuster two-day conference. Between our team on the Guider stand and our seminar: Harnessing the Power of your People to Scale Social Learning, we were there to get the word out on the benefits of using Guider in your organisation.
We were extremely lucky to be joined by our clients Clyde & Co, a globally integrated law firm that has used our software to successfully scale its global mentoring program, to help deliver our seminar.
Missed the talk? Catch up on the highlights below!
Harnessing the Power of your People to Scale Social Learning
We kicked off with a crowded room full of learning and development experts putting their hands up if they’d ever had a personal experience of mentoring… *Cue a room full of raised hands*
When Nicola asked; “Keep your hands up if this experience was a positive one” and no one budged, we knew this was going to be an interesting talk!
We weren’t there to tell everyone how great mentoring is; it was clear that everyone already knew that. Instead, in the spirit of learning technologies, Nicola, Guy and Naomi were there to teach everyone something new.
The talk covered:

The importance of social learning
87% of employees identify social knowledge sharing as essential, but only 37% feel the same about formal company training.
Mentoring is an incredibly effective way of creating a culture of social learning. When you harness the knowledge already in your business, you can create a low cost and low touch way to spread expertise across your organisation.
Mentoring is all about people and how we learn through building positive relationships with others.
We’re social creatures at heart and through our interactions with others, we learn…
- About new perspectives
- About problem-solving
- About soft and hard skills
- About building self-awareness
And so this makes the uses of mentoring really broad, as you can see from the Venn diagram below:

Here at Guider, we work with a number of large organisations on a range of mentoring, reverse mentoring, diversity and inclusion, coaching, and sponsorship initiatives. The common factor in all of these programs is that people come together to share knowledge and experiences and to learn from one another.
We wholeheartedly believe in the power of mentoring as a diverse and multifaceted solution for businesses worldwide. It’s not just a workplace perk or a nice to have, but a necessity.
So, why isn’t every business doing this really successfully? Well, that’s an excellent question!
Why mentoring fails
We know that mentoring seems simple, but the reality is it can be hard to implement a company-wide program and to do it really well. This is especially true for large, global organisations such as Clyde & Co.
From excess administrative burden to lack of accessibility, there are many ways that mentoring can fail.
Watch Naomi and Guy talking about the challenges they faced setting up a mentoring program first-hand
A key barrier to success that we notice a lot at Guider, is that mentoring doesn’t have a dedicated home in most organisations. This means that it’s not clear what department it sits in or who is responsible for it. This can cause silos and inconsistency, as well as affect the budgets and resources that get the program off the ground.
Another key challenge is the process. Setting up, matching and tracking multiple mentoring relationships, particularly across global offices, is a huge administrative burden. And when there is no ownership of the program to start with, program managers end up doing all of this extra work on the side of their day job.
But we’re here to tell you that there are solutions to all of these problems and more!
How Guider works
Guider provides a centralised solution to break down communication silos, give mentoring a dedicated home in your organisation, save your program lead time and administrative burden, and allow you to scale your program to positively impact more lives through mentoring.
At the end of the day, the most important part is the impact that you can have on your people through mentoring. What good is a program that can only benefit 40 people in an organisation of 2,000?
Guider connects your people with ease. Below is a short video highlighting just one mentoring relationship at Clyde & Co found through Guider:
Clyde & Co’s success story
Who better to talk about harnessing the power of your people through mentoring, than our clients that have been doing just that?
We handed the floor over to Naomi and Guy to hear them talk first-hand about their experiences using our platform…

About Clyde & Co
Guy started by introducing Clyde & Co and the old barriers that they faced when setting up a mentoring program. As a global law firm, with more than 50 offices worldwide and 4,000 staff across continents, making meaningful connections between colleagues across the business was a challenge, to say the least.
Yet, by using Guider’s software they have already been able to make a huge impact by bringing people together through mentoring.
How Guider works for them
Guy shared the key features of Guider that have helped Clyde & Co scale their mentoring effectively. These are:
- Ease of access: With Guider, there is one destination for mentoring. You can create a custom landing page and further features such as a content hub will support your people to make the most of mentoring.
- Dynamic templates: Guider provides helpful suggestions along the way so you can tailor your profile and messages to your mentor effectively.
- Effective profiles: Gone are the basic name, title, and location fields. Now you can add additional fields like LinkedIn profiles, outside interests, skills and personality traits. All this facilitates better matches.
- More matches: Guider finds your top three matches, widening your choice of mentor and expanding your networks. This removes a huge headache from program leads that would otherwise have to manually pair people up!
He then shared their 8 tips for running a successful mentoring program. These are…

Naomi went on to discuss the success and impact of the program. They’ve had some incredible results, such as…
- 1,000 participants joined the program in less than a year
- It is now accessible to all – anyone in any Clyde & Co team can get a mentor
- Barriers have been broken down and silos are gone, leading to greater inter-departmental communication across the board
But you don’t need to take our word for it. Naomi shared some of the feedback from within the business that they’ve had on the program so far

We’re really proud of our work with Clyde & Co and are thrilled to see the ongoing success of their mentoring program. While there wasn’t enough time for a Q&A at the end of our seminar, we were happy to welcome more people back to the stand for a chat.
We’d like to thank both Naomi and Guy for joining us at the conference. It’s always a pleasure to hear from a happy customer!
Find out more about Clyde & Co’s mentoring journey here.
Thank you to Learning Technologies for a fantastic two-day conference. It’s been wonderful to get to meet in person again and talk about the fantastic benefits of mentoring.
With a mentoring platform such as Guider, scaling your mentoring program and harnessing the power of your people is possible. Because that’s what it’s all about: bringing people together to share positive experiences. Our technology is simply the enabler.
Feeling inspired? If you want to replicate the success of Clyde & Co’s program, get in touch with Guider today! You can schedule a discovery call by booking a demo.