Most organizations invest heavily in training, and for good reason. Training is one of the most effective ways to build skills, develop leaders and improve performance across a broad employee population. The challenge is that training alone rarely delivers lasting behavior change.

Let’s be honest: We’ve all gone to a workshop and left feeling energized to put what we learned into action, only to return to our desks and get so caught up in the day to day, that all that learning (and energy) goes right out the window.

Enter mentorship.

Mentoring not only reinforces learning, but it also gives people individualized support where they need it most and creates accountability to apply what they learned in training. Information without application has a limited impact. Mentoring bridges the gap between learning something and actually doing it. For learning and development (L&D) leaders whose training budgets are under constant scrutiny, mentoring offers something rare: a way to maximize the impact of investments they’ve already made.

The Access Problem: Mentoring for Everyone

Saying that mentors change the lives of their mentees isn’t hyperbole. Ankur Ahlowalia, the CEO of Chronus, credits a mentorship program at Motorola with fundamentally changing the trajectory of his career. Research tells a similar story: Three-quarters of executives say mentoring has been critical to their career development.

That impact isn’t limited to senior leaders. It shows up at every level of an organization. Nine out of 10 employees with a mentor report being satisfied with their jobs, with more than half rating themselves as “very satisfied.”

Yet many organizations have traditionally reserved mentoring programs for high-potential employees, emerging leaders and top graduate recruits. Opening mentoring to the full organization creates value that invitation-only programs simply can’t.

Research published in Harvard Business Review found that teams with greater cognitive diversity solved complex problems faster than more cognitively similar teams. Mentoring intentionally creates opportunities for that diversity by bringing together people with different experiences, perspectives and ways of thinking. In the process, it surfaces skills, ideas, ambition and institutional knowledge that might otherwise go untapped while sending a clear message to those who are often overlooked: your development matters here too.

Scaling mentoring can sound daunting, but structured programs, smart matching and guided conversation frameworks make it achievable at every level without sacrificing the individualized experience that makes mentoring work. Amazon is one example.

The Amazon Mentoring Program grew 750% in its first year, expanding from 18,800 to 160,000 employees, and has since evolved into more than 100 individual programs, spanning leadership development, high-potential tracks and mentoring circles for affinity groups. The question for many organizations is no longer whether mentoring can scale, but whether they have the systems in place to support it.

Developing Mentors: The Role of L&D

One mistake organizations often make is recruiting mentors and assuming they already know how to mentor. Most don’t. Being good at your job doesn’t automatically make you skilled at guiding someone else.

The best mentors aren’t always the most senior people in the room. Look for people who naturally ask questions rather than give directives, give honest and caring feedback, and have a demonstrated track record of investing in the people around them. Manager nominations, peer recognition and voluntary sign-ups can all be effective ways to identify potential mentors.

Once mentors are selected, their skills still need to be sharpened. A short pre-launch orientation or eLearning that covers how to structure a conversation, ask better questions and build the kind of trust that makes a mentee open up provides a strong foundation. Communities of practice during the program let mentors troubleshoot and learn from each other in real time. And closing the loop with a mentee pulse survey about 30 days into the relationship gives everyone a chance to course-correct while the relationship is still forming. Programs that skip this step tend to find out the hard way: A mentor who feels lost will quietly disengage, and the investment in recruiting and matching is lost.

Building a Culture of Development for Everyone

The goal of training and mentoring programs shouldn’t be to support only the top 10% of employees. It should be to create a culture of development that reaches everyone, from the newest hire to the most senior leader.

T-Mobile’s mentoring program illustrates the potential impact. Participants achieved a 78% retention rate compared with 41% for nonparticipants and were 26% more likely to advance to a higher job level within 12 months.

Strong outcomes, however, don’t sustain themselves. Mentoring programs need visibility, recognition and stories that demonstrate their impact. When leaders see how mentoring influences retention, mobility and employee growth, the business case becomes must easier to make. Replacing employees is far more expensive than investing in their development, and retention is anything but a soft metric.

Ultimately, training reaches its full potential when someone helps learners put new skills into practice. That someone is a mentor.