With more and more digitization, obviously, there’s more and more mentors and mentees who work together across distance and sometimes even never get to meet in person. So it is very tempting to call the collaboration E-Mentoring because they’re using digital tools such as E-Mail.

Here’s a quick thought: We have two things, we have the type of relationship we have and then we have the mode which we use to communicate. For the mode to communicate it could be WhatsApp, Skype, video, writing and of course in person. The other thing is the type of relationship we have; if I have an employee or a team member somewhere else in the world would I call them E-team member or E-employee or if I haven’t seen a friend for a long time and just spoken on skype would I call them an E-friend, right? So, the type of relationship that we have and the mode we use to communicate can be differentiated easily.

Mentoring exists since thousands of years and regardless of the mode you communicate with whether you sit in person across the table or in a video conference, mentoring is still about the same values, it’s still about trust, it’s still about trustworthiness, it’s still about confidentiality, it’s still about asking great questions and it’s still about caring for each other.

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So, do you have any other creative prefixes which we can add to the term mentoring to make it a little bit more creative? Feel free to share your ideas in the comments I’m looking forward to hearing from you.