Most of us have been influenced by the people we have met in business and in life, and the wisdom or knowledge that has been passed along to us by either; an ethical person, an effective leader or teacher, someone who was your coach or ally? This someone, was your mentor.

Mentoring can be a cost effective way of transferring skills, changing attitudes and behaviours, improving performance and retaining top performers within your company.

Attend this month's seminar to understand how mentoring can benefit your company & to learn how to establish an effective mentoring program.

HR corner

How to Retain the Best Employees
As Baby Boomers retire and fewer workers are available to replace them, retaining the best employees becomes more important. Retention takes on more significance to HR professionals, who see most sharply the toll turnover takes on a business: loss of efficiency, higher production costs, long searches, loss of job knowledge and lack of security among remaining employees.

Here are 10 tips for retaining key employees in this competitive job market:

• Select the right employee for the job.
• Compensate fairly and make sure benefits keep pace with those the competition offers.
• Train managers to be clear about their expectations.
• Seek employees' ideas on how best to do their jobs.
• Provide new challenges.
• Encourage employees to contribute their expertise outside their general skill areas. Cross-train to give employees a broader range of skills.
• Give feedback frequently. Praise publicly and constructively criticise in private.
• Ask key employees to help you recruit -- not only their qualified friends, but colleagues they may have met through networking functions.
• If you are the top executive, make it your business to know all of your employees.
• Say thank you for a job well done. Reward not only with recognition and pay increases, but with bonuses, gifts or an extra day off.

technical CORNER

Assessment Tools Must Be Valid
An assessment tool is valid if it measures specific characteristics required to do a job and if the measurements are accurate.

We determine an assessment tool's validity by looking at its purpose. Once we determine the tool is valid for a specific purpose, that validity cannot be transferred for any another purpose.

For example, we can agree an instrument can validly predict a person's ability to accurately measure, add and subtract. We cannot, however, use the same instrument to predict the person's leadership or sales skills.

The validity coefficient is a strong indicator of how valid the assessment is for a specific purpose under specific circumstances. It measures the degree of relationship between test performance and job performance.

Validity is an important characteristic in assessment tools because it gives meaning to a person's scores on an assessment.

If the evidence shows the assessment tool is a valid predictor of performance on a specific job, we know that people who earn high scores on the assessment are more likely to do the job well than people with low scores.

We can also establish an assessment's validity as applied to specific groups. A tool that is valid in predicting how well an executive solves problems does not allow for useful comparisons about ability in clerical assistants. Additionally, the reading level of the test may not be valid for both groups.

Developers of assessments must describe the groups they used to develop the test, detail which groups can be validly tested by the assessment, and provide an interpretation of scores for individuals belonging to specific groups.