Mentoring from HKA -

Building an International Mentoring Culture focused on connection, engagement and retention.

This case study explores how HKA built an international mentoring culture focused on connection, engagement and retention across their global consultancy.

When James Dowling joined HKA in 2021, the global consultancy had already run a small pilot in the Americas Region - whilst the pilot was a success, it relied on a lot of manual intervention making it difficult to sustain or scale up across the HKA world.

"Connection and trust in the mentor and mentee relationship is the key for success and I wanted a platform that enabled our people to be able find and connect with mentors they felt would bring them the most benefit."

After reviewing several options, HKA selected PushFar for its ease of use and intuitive self-matching functionality.

"It was a really simple platform to use, and it ticked all our boxes. Holly from the PushFar team set things up quickly, but it was so intuitive that I could configure the system myself in a way that would work for HKA quickly."

"Whilst pockets of mentoring were happening informally, PushFar enabled all HKA colleagues to benefit from mentoring in a more structured way and tap into expertise from around the HKA world."

James Dowling, Partner, Global Learning, Development and Succession, HKA

HKA launched the platform on June 24, 2024. Within a month, 60% of the company had registered.

"You don't often see that level of engagement and take-up. But mentoring was something people clearly wanted - they just needed the right technology to make it easy for them."

From there, the impact grew. Employees began forming international mentoring relationships - many with multiple mentors across different parts of the world, aligned to personal and professional development goals. Areas of focus included forensic accounting, leadership, and business development.

"People are being really adventurous. We've got individuals with five mentors, all in different regions, for different reasons. It's helping break down silos and build capability in ways we hadn't seen before."

To embed mentoring long-term, James and his team ensure that all employees joining HKA were aware of our mentoring capability through our onboarding process. We also wanted to ensure that time spent on this critical development activity was correctly captured on a dedicated timesheet code, enabling us to report on the impact and engagement for mentoring.

"We measure things like registration, profile completion, mentoring hours, and active relationships. It's not just a nice-to-have - we have the data to show it's working and our People are engaged."

Crucially, mentoring supports HKA's core development model - where 70% of learning comes from real work, shadowing, and expert guidance.

"In our type of expert business having senior and expert mentors develop our future talent is key to their career success. Mentoring helps prepare them through real-world insights and experience you can't get from a course."

Today, mentoring is embedded into the fabric of HKA's development culture. It supports global collaboration, accelerates on-the-job learning, and gives individuals the confidence to take on new challenges - wherever they are in the world.