Knowledge Transfer through Diversity Coach and Mentoring Partnerships

Abstract

Organisations recognise today that it is often difficult to recruit and retain personal with the necessary knowledge and to solve efficiently skill shortage i.e. by employment people with special needs. Mentoring and coaching particularly on the job under consideration of the diversity can be organised to address these aspects.

This article focuses on different aspects of knowledge transfer (KT), coaching and monitoring. The paper gives first a very brief introduction on diversity coaching (DC) and on formal and informal mentoring involving transfer of knowledge from moreto- less-experienced individuals; competences of a mentor in context of personal and professional requirements are also presented. A web-based community service approach by using social media is outlined, which supports KT through mentoring in Communities of Practice (CoPs). They are networks of individuals who share a domain of interest and knowledge about which they communicate (online in the case of Virtual Communities of Practice - VCoPs). In the last parts of the paper examples from two projects are given. The project IBB 2 (http://www.lebenshilfeguv. at/unsere_dienste/eu_projekte/ibb_2_integrative_behindertenbetreuung) is a European Leonardo innovation transfer project aimed to support people with disabilities to entry and to be successfully integrated into professional life through DC and the mentoring approach. One of the aims of the project Net Knowing 2.0 (http://www.netknowing.com/) is to help SMEs to turn their daily work into a source of corporate learning for all their employees and to support KT by efficient using of informal learning and introducing a mentoring approach.