Ms Marie Devitt:

Regarding the in-business support of mentors, typically, the first thing to be identified would be the team going to take the young person. Often, it is the HR team itself that will take on a young person for a role. Mentors often volunteer for the role, but sometimes it involves discussion with managers. What is important for mentors is that they are given the time by their managers to dedicate to supporting the young person to settle in during the early days. This will affect the day-to-day work of mentors. We learned yesterday that sometimes, this negatively impacts the day-to-day work of staff members. This work, therefore, sometimes needs to be shared out across two or three mentors.

We provide training. An online training programme is available to all our partners. Equally, we also provide the occupational therapy expertise and link consistently. The key attributes of being a good mentor are simple: kindness, patience, understanding and empathy. Mentors do not have to be brilliant at delivering presentations or anything like that. This work is really about the day-to-day stuff, that is, the incidental learning and settling in.

One extremely interesting issue that has cropped up recently and across several internships concerned food and canteens and the young person going into the organisation where there is a huge array of free food, how exciting that is and then the controls regarding how many meals or coffees someone can have.

One company rang us to tell us it was very concerned because our graduate had already had three double espressos and it was only 9.30 a.m.