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Mentorship can do more than boost skills advancement and support individual career growth. As Amazonâs mentoring strategy demonstrates, these initiatives can elevate an employerâs brand, provide opportunities to learn more about employee challenges and build a management pipeline that ensures innovative voices are heard.
Amazon launched the Amazon Mentoring Program (AMP) in partnership with Chronus in 2016. The program provides a personalized platform for matching mentors and mentees across a variety of mentoring programs with the ďŹexibility to adapt to new priorities and objectives as they arise. The program has grown 750% since its ďŹrst year. What started with 18,800 users now supports 160,000 employees, including nearly 50,000 who identify with one or more aďŹnity groupsâa group of employees linked by a common interest, background, demographic or goal.
In the last year, Chronus enabled the Amazon mentoring team to scale up AMP to help leaders create a more productive, more diverse and more just work environment.
Mentoring provides a safe space, empowers employees to take ownership of their growth and development, and enables leaders to show up authentically.
– Melony Menard, Senior Program Manager
âMentoring provides a safe space, empowers employees to take ownership of their growth and development, and enables leaders to show up authentically,â said Melony Menard, senior program manager at Amazon Mentoring. âBoth mentors and mentees share their successes and their challenges to pay it forward for the next generation.â
At its core, Amazon has long understood the link between culture and employee connection in the workplace. Amazon turned to mentoring as a formal practice in order to drive connection and propel development for a more productive and engaged workforce. To do this effectively, the Amazon team built their mentoring strategy on four distinct pillars:
Create a safe space for authentic relationship-building across the organization. Mentors play a critical role in developing the community due to the size of the company and the rise of remote work.
Drive ownership of career development. Mentors beneďŹt by developing their leadership skills (e.g. actively listening, providing actionable feedback and leading with empathy). Mentees beneďŹt through exposure to new ways of thinking while getting real-time feedback and support.
Provide a valuable opportunity for seeking out diverse perspectives, gaining new or different ways of thinking and broadening perspectives.
Help new and existing managers leverage mentoring as a continuous professional development tool.
The Amazon Mentoring Program launched its ďŹrst program, a one-to-one Amazon career mentoring, with a focus on self-directed matching. Beyond this, AMP introduced boutique mentoring tracks that allowed aďŹnity groups and business units to customize their own mentoring solutions for their greatest needs.
Mentoring raises Amazonâs collective performance bar and enhances our ability to deliver for both internal and external customers.
– Melony Menard, Senior Program Manager
Since then, Amazonâs mentoring strategy has evolved into more than 100 individual programs, targeting everything from high-potential employees and leadership development to mentoring circles for affinity groups across intersections, including women, black employees, military employees and beyond. Here are just a few of their existing programs:
My mentor and I had several sessions where we discussed my day- to-day role, assessed my broader career trajectory, and identified areas I could work on to eventually move into a technical role. Not only was my mentor a significant influence in helping me get promoted, but in July 2022, I started a technical role as a Senior Solutions Architect, in which Iâm learning a huge amount.
– Mentee
To support its goal of providing employees with more opportunities to learn from and engage with peers, Amazonâs mentoring strategy focused on helping employees take ownership of their growth and development. The Chronus platform helped create highly compatible mentoring pairs and provide program admins deep analytical insight into program performance and organizational outcomes.
Chronus enabled Amazon to personalize their matching algorithm to better support growth, skills building and cross-organizational understanding.
âThe ability to create a custom algorithm that enables better aligned mentoring connections not only ensures scalability but creates a better customer experience,â said Menard.
As the mentoring strategy at Amazon evolved, the program added admin matching and hybrid matching styles, alongside their self matching capability. With the addition of hybrid matching, mentees had autonomy in choosing whether to self-select mentors or lean on program admins for matching support, resulting in a program that was more customizable to participant preferences. These types of decisions align matches based on whatâs most important to the employee, such as career level, job title, area of expertise or location. Menard noted this is the foundation of the programâmatching two people who are a good ďŹt but otherwise wouldnât connect.
Chronus enables organizations to launch multiple tracks under one program. Amazon used this ďŹexibility to launch boutique tracks, enabling Amazon to meet the needs of more employee groups.
Going from one to more than 100 mentoring programs doesnât happen overnight. Having the ability to set up new programs with their own admins, under one global governance system was a vital part of scaling AMP to what it is today. In addition, being able to change the format of mentoring provided based on each programâs need and audience allowed Amazon to better meet the needs of employee groups, based on what they wanted most from their development and connection.
The platformâs ability to showcase program performance from a global level, while also being able to dissect individual program performance makes it easy to see whatâs working and whatâs not. With clear dashboards and reporting, the Amazon mentoring team is able to build on program successes.
âSometimes weâre so knee-deep in the work,â said Carla Love, Program Manager at Amazon Mentoring. âTo be able to step back and look at the growth from a visual perspective has been not only invigorating but also rewarding.â
It didnât seem like an obvious match as my mentor is a very senior executive with brilliant technical knowledge, while I was just starting out in AWS. But he has proven to be the mentor I never knew I needed. He has allowed me to look at the business through his lens and pushed me to get out of my comfort zone. My mentor has been my ally, guided me in my decisions and held me accountable throughout.
– Mentee
Understanding the participant or the customer experience is the cornerstone of every great mentoring program. In order to understand mentoringâs true impact, Amazon looks at the following metrics:
From inception to now, the Amazon Mentoring Program has seen exponential growth across nearly every metric.
100+
Mentoring Programs
160,000
Mentoring Participants
750%
Program Growth
8%
Higher Job Change Rate For Participants
73%
Managers Had Connections Across Amazon Tenures
86%
Satisfaction Rate
Chronus really allows us to create a
custom, inclusive and structured environment for employees.
– Melony Menard, Senior Program Manager
Leading enterprises turn to Chronus for its powerful, scalable platform to address key workplace challenges like disengagement, turnover and disconnected teams, especially in remote and hybrid environments. Chronus mentoring software enables organizations to leverage mentoring and employee communities to create meaningful connections, enhance engagement and promote continuous learning.
With its simplicity, strong security protocols and proven scalability, Chronus helps companies efficiently manage and grow programs that drive retention, productivity and collaboration. Trusted by brands like Amazon, LVMH, ExxonMobil, T-Mobile, Harvard University and Paychex, Chronus breaks down silos and builds a culture of development and connection, ensuring employees are engaged and supported. For organizations looking to nurture talent and stay competitive, Chronus is the solution.
Drive 50% Higher Engagement and Transform Your Mentorship Program with Chronus.