The Business Networking Exchange is proud to announce its 2006 educational initiative providing one-to-one mentor-protégé relationships that involve a seasoned business professional assisting to enhance a protégé's learning and progress toward success and targeted business goals. The professional (mentor) and the internet participant (protégé) communicate by exchanging multiple e-mail messages every week.

Since all e-mail mentor-protégé relationships in this program are one-to-one, students and mentors get to know one another very well over time. Among other things, this allows your mentor to have insights as to how what you are learning relates to your interests and hopes for the future. The mentors can share with you their own experiences and insights that can help you create your own successful path up the corporate ladder.

The mentors can share a perspective that can help you get the most out of the resources available that relate to your areas of interests. In some cases, a mentor may help you discover resources that you may never have come across otherwise.

Not only will you communicate on a weekly e-mail basis, you and your mentor can meet a few times during the year to share information if you can access the New York Metropolitan area.

Frequent communication between you and your mentor is very important to experiencing success in the program. It is a good idea to put your mentor's e-mail address and nickname in the address book of your e-mail program. You need to answer all e-mail sent from your mentor in a timely manner. Check for e-mail messages from your mentor frequently and respond as soon as you can. Take the time to let your mentor know in advance if you will not be able to check or answer your mail for a certain period of time.

This is an important responsibility. Few things are as disappointing and frustrating to a mentor (who has put forth a great effort in his message) than to receive a very short reply from the protégé! Effective communication takes time. Be sure to put forth a genuine effort in all messages you send to your mentor!

A great idea is to include a copy of the mentor's previous message in the messages you send. Your mentor may receive dozens of e-mail messages on any given day. They will greatly appreciate the reminder of what they wrote you. This also helps you make sure that you thoroughly respond to your mentor's entire message. It is a good idea to place your responses immediately after the appropriate portions of the copy of your mentor's previous message.

This item goes along with exerting a genuine effort in all your messages. The amount of success you experience in this program is proportionate to the level of commitment you bring to the relationship. If you are open and honest with your mentor, they will be so with you. We encourage you to take full advantage of this unique opportunity to work and learn with an established professional.

Make sure you keep up the pace of communicating with your mentor at least 2-3 times a week. It is helpful to maintain a record in a notebook of how often you and your mentor communicate. It is also a good idea to save all of the e-mail messages you and your mentor send and receive to one another.