
How AIHS is Uplifting Australia’s Safety Professionals with Mentorloop
with Jenna Mitropoulos,
The Australian Institute of Health & Safety (AIHS)
with Jenna Mitropoulos,
The Australian Institute of Health & Safety (AIHS)
By moving to Mentorloop, AIHS turned mentoring into a scalable professional development engine for its 4,000+ members. The program now empowers safety professionals at every career stage, from students to seasoned leaders, to learn, grow, and lift industry standards.
The Australian Institute of Health & Safety (AIHS) is the national membership body for professionals working in occupational health and safety (OHS). With over 4,000 members across Australia, AIHS provides education, resources, and networking to raise the standard of workplace safety.
Mentoring has become a cornerstone of that mission. The AIHS Mentoring Program connects students, early-career practitioners, and seasoned safety leaders to share knowledge, build professional confidence, and ultimately improve safety outcomes in Australian workplaces.
For years, AIHS coordinated its mentoring program manually. A handful of pairs were tracked via spreadsheets — 20 people total, 10 pairs per cohort. It was valuable, but limited.
With membership growing and demand increasing, it became clear that AIHS needed:
“We recognised the need to move to a platform to streamline administration, and to make mentoring more convenient and accessible for busy safety professionals.”
Since moving to Mentorloop, the AIHS program has scaled dramatically:
But the biggest impact has been qualitative:
Mentors discovering new perspectives: “I learned more about my own practice today than I thought I would.”
Mentees stepping up with confidence and later returning as mentors themselves
Safety professionals taking insights back to their workplaces — sometimes as the only safety person in their organisation — creating ripple effects that can literally mean the difference between positive or negative safety outcomes
“This program shows there’s always something else to learn. It uplifts the whole safety profession.”
With support from Mentorloop, AIHS re-engineered its mentoring approach:
The results?
Mentorloop turned AIHS’s mentoring into a high-value member benefit by delivering three things every program leader needs:
💡 Efficiency that scales
The Resource Library and Highlights tools slashed admin time, giving participants the confidence to self-serve, thereby freeing up AIHS to focus on strategy rather than spreadsheets.
📈 Real-time visibility of data
Dashboards and reporting put program health at Jenna’s fingertips, making it easy to prove impact to leadership and continuously improve matches.
🤝 Partnership, not just software
With responsive support and product collaboration, Mentorloop helped AIHS evolve its program design while maintaining a consistently high quality score — ensuring growth never comes at the cost of experience.
“Working closely with the Mentorloop team validated our new direction. It’s helped us maintain our quality score while scaling and rebranding the program.”
AIHS has bold ambitions for the next stage of its program:
Expanding to enable self-match and year-round access for students and professionals
Growing diversity in participation — reaching long-standing members who’ve never tried mentoring
Securing sponsorship to support sustainable growth beyond the current 300 participants per year
Encouraging mentees to “pay it forward” by becoming mentors themselves
With Mentorloop, AIHS has turned a small, spreadsheet-based initiative into a national mentoring program shaping the next generation of safety leaders. By scaling access, focusing on values, and embedding mentoring into the member experience, AIHS is uplifting the entire OHS profession — one mentoring relationship at a time.
Want to scale mentoring like AIHS? We can show you how:
The Australian Institute of Health & Safety (AIHS)
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I love that mentors want to come back, mentees want to step up, and the whole community keeps growing together. With Mentorloop, we’ve scaled from 10 pairs on a spreadsheet to 150 participants per cohort, without losing quality.
– Jenna Mitropoulos, The Australian Institute of Health & Safety (AIHS)
What Role Does Equity and Equality Play in Your Mentoring Program?
The right mentoring program should level the playing field to empower entire cohorts of people: workplaces, member associations, social groups and educational institutions. Equality should be a cherished value so that every individual can thrive—whoever they are, whatever their background, however they worship or whomever they love. But we can’t arrive at equality without it’s often forgotten partner, equity.
What does a Mentoring Program Coordinator do?
Being a Mentoring Program Coordinator is an incredibly rewarding experience that positively impacts the lives of many. And while mentoring programs don’t fully run themselves (even though Mentorloop can do a great deal of the heavy lifting!), they do require a point of contact that can steer the program in the right direction for the organisation that is running one.
Building Quality Feedback Into Mentoring Relationships
This is Part 8 of our 10-part series on the 10 Key Qualities and Habits of a Highly Effective Mentor.
In this post, we’ll look at how mentors can successfully build quality feedback into their mentoring. Quality feedback is priceless because it clarifies expectations, helps people learn from their mistakes, and builds confidence. It also allows mentees to more effectively take what their mentors say and turn it into action.