Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS)
Background
Founded in 1854 ICAS is a global, professional membership organisation and business network for Chartered Accountants. ICAS's 23,000 members form a vibrant global community of finance and business professionals united by a commitment to ethical leadership.
Aim of the Program
ICAS strives to support, nurture and empower its members by delivering high-quality membership, connections and relevant and rigorous career-long learning. The ICAS Mentoring programme was developed to allow members to share skills, knowledge, insights and gain new perspectives whilst having the opportunity to keep their CPD up to date. It is important to ICAS that the programme is inclusive offering members from different backgrounds the opportunity to fulfil their potential.
Our Solution
PLD was the chosen supplier following a comprehensive tendering process. The ICAS Mentoring programme was launched in February 2022 and proved popular from the outset with a great initial uptake from both mentors and mentees, which has shown continued engagement.
The platform has been configured to incorporate single sign-on, allowing users to access their mentoring account from their ICAS credentials without the need to separately sign into the mentoring platform.
The mentor and mentee profile pages were configured to ICAS's specific requirements and included fields where mentees could select the areas of expertise and skills they were looking for and mentors could select the areas of expertise and skills they could offer. Information was also collected on areas they would like to talk about, their location, work sector and characteristics, so that mentees could choose if these were areas that were important to them and select suitable mentors based on these criteria.
The matching process that has been put in place ensures that mentees can easily identify suitable mentors that most closely meet their needs.
Results
To date just short of 200 mentoring requests have been sent by mentees, with over 160 mentees and 220 mentors registered on the platform, growing steadily month on month. Career advice and Continuing Professional Development advice have proven to be the key areas where mentees have been seeking expertise. When it comes to skills, leadership and management, professional skills, commercial skills, and enterprise/entrepreneurial skills have all proven to be popular areas. Mentees are keen to talk about allyship, returning to work and imposter syndrome as part of their mentoring.
Platform admins can track the programme's impact from a diversity and inclusion perspective through a suite of reporting tools.
Client Feedback
Since launching the ICAS Mentoring programme with PLD, we've seen continuous growth in registrations with both mentors and mentees and collated positive feedback from our members' mentoring experience. The platform is very dynamic and user friendly and we love how we can track results and performance on a daily/weekly basis to see how our marketing activities are performing in helping to drive mentoring engagement. PLD is always helpful and responsive with any queries we have, and is quick to respond and offer support.
Suzanne Ezzi
Member Engagement Manager
