The Capstone Begins: Designing Mentorship Programs That Develop Both Sides
While managing education programs by day, I’ve been pursuing my Master’s in Information Design and Strategy at Northwestern by night. Here’s what I’m researching: peer-based skills mentoring programs that create value for both sides of the equation.
While managing education programs by day, I’ve been pursuing my Master’s in Information Design and Strategy at Northwestern by night. Now I’m in the final stretch: working on my capstone project.
Here’s what I’m researching: peer-based skills mentoring programs that create value for both sides of the equation.
The Problem With How Most Programs Are Designed
Most workplace mentorship programs focus on the mentee — career development, soft skills, navigating the organization. The mentor’s growth? Usually an afterthought.
Mentors are expected to invest time, energy, and expertise. In return, they get the satisfaction of giving back. Maybe some informal recognition. The assumption is that experienced people have enough to give, and giving is enough of a reward.
But what if we designed mentorship programs differently? What if mentor development wasn’t an afterthought — it was a design requirement?
The Equal Exchange Model
The framework I’m building treats mentoring as an equal exchange:
🤓 Mentees gain technical knowledge and job-specific skills
💪 Mentors develop their teaching, coaching, and leadership capabilities
🤝 Both sides have clear frameworks for tracking their development
This isn’t idealistic. It’s practical. When mentors develop real, measurable skills through the relationship, they have a genuine reason to stay engaged. The program stops depending on goodwill and starts producing value for everyone involved.
What I Already Know From Experience
I learned this the hard way. Earlier in my career, I designed mentorship programs for communities of practice and watched them struggle — not because people didn’t care, but because participants new to mentorship didn’t have the structure they needed to succeed.
The mentors wanted to help. The mentees wanted to learn. The relationships didn’t produce what anyone hoped because nobody had defined what success looked like, how to have a productive session, or how to know if the relationship was working.
Structure isn’t the opposite of authentic connection. It’s what makes authentic connection sustainable at scale.
What I’m Building
For my capstone, I’m building a framework that makes it easier to design, launch, and measure peer mentoring programs that develop both mentors and mentees. The goal is something practitioners can actually use — not a theoretical model that requires a consultant to operationalize, but a practical set of tools for L&D teams, DesignOps teams, and the operations professionals who are increasingly asked to stand up development programs without a formal learning design background.
More to come as the research develops.
This post is part of an ongoing series documenting the research behind my Northwestern capstone project on peer mentoring program design.
I'm a Learning Architect with deep roots in UX leadership and an L&D career spanning published e-learning, workforce training, and enterprise capability systems. I bring a UX instinct to everything I build and I design programs that teams can own, operate, and scale without the original designer in the loop.
Most mentoring conversations focus on the mentee: what they need to learn, who they should be paired with, how they’ll grow. The mentor’s development is usually an afterthought. This series argues for a different model — one where mentoring is designed as an equal exchange.
There’s a type of connection that matters at work — not just to your team or your manager, but to the organization itself. This kind of connection is harder to build than most organizations realize. And it’s more fragile than they’d like to admit.
Going into the literature review for my Northwestern capstone, I thought I’d find maybe 3 or 4 situations where peer mentoring works well. I found eight. And the benefits — and challenges — go deeper than I anticipated.
