How Arden University Turned Career Mentoring Into a Confidence Engine for Students
with Emma Hawkins
Careers Mentoring Officer, Arden University
with Emma Hawkins
Careers Mentoring Officer, Arden University
Most mentoring programs don’t fail because the idea is bad — they fail because the admin becomes unmanageable before the impact has a chance to show up. That’s the exact pattern Emma Hawkins, Career Mentoring Officer at Arden University, had already lived through twice at other institutions before she built Arden’s program from scratch. This is the story of what changed when she decided not to repeat it a third time — and what the results look like for any institution weighing the same decision today.
Before Mentorloop, Arden University — a UK-based, digital-first university serving lifelong learners — had no career mentoring provision at all. There was an existing peer-to-peer scheme, but it only handled onboarding, not the other end of a student’s journey. Meanwhile, the data told a harder story: students from underrepresented groups — Black and minority ethnic students, women, and students with disabilities — were progressing into jobs, further study, or training at lower rates than their peers.
Emma Hawkins, Arden’s Career Mentoring Officer, was tasked with building a program from the ground up. She’d run mentoring schemes elsewhere before — and watched them hit the same wall every time: spreadsheets, manual admin, and a program that couldn’t grow past a certain size without falling apart. If that story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the default outcome for most mentoring programs that don’t start with the right infrastructure.
Determined not to repeat it, Emma ran a formal evaluation of around ten mentoring platforms before choosing Mentorloop — evaluating each against a detailed wish list built from her own past frustrations.
Across the six-month pilot:
Bulk messaging by tag replaced spreadsheets. Every participant issue routed through one Loop instead of scattered emails. And matching — which Emma says “taken like weeks and weeks at other universities” — took two to three days for around 100 participants using Smart Match. For anyone comparing platforms today, that’s the practical difference between a program you can run solo and one that needs a team just to keep the lights on.
One mentee, nervous about breaking into financial services as a woman in an industry so heavily male-dominated, was matched with a mentor working in that exact field. Over six months, her mentor helped her identify her skills, build her CV, and prepare for a networking event she’d found “terrifying.” She attended, made real industry contacts, and secured a volunteering placement in the field. As she put it:
“I can now confidently present a good CV for employers. I’m more confident in the career path I’ve chosen, and I’ve even gained a voluntary job during this program.”
That’s not just a nice outcome for one student – it’s the same underlying capability (structured matching plus built-in progress tracking) that produced the 92% engagement rate across the whole cohort. The emotional win and the institutional metric are the same story, told at two different scales.
Arden has moved from being capped by participant count to an unlimited one, allowing for as many mentors and mentees as they can recruit for. A new pilot is also launching for Arden’s Berlin campus — previously excluded from the scheme entirely, now included without adding headcount.
"Try and get budget to get a system in place... for someone looking to set a mentoring program up, Mentorloop makes it so much easier."
Careers Mentoring Officer, Arden University
Share this Article
Join the loop
"We evaluated around ten different mentoring software providers, and Mentorloop came out on top by a country mile. Matching used to take weeks and weeks at other universities - with Mentorloop, I did it in two to three days."
– with Emma Hawkins, Careers Mentoring Officer, Arden University
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.
