Last Update: 20 August 2026
Quick answer: Structured mentoring is consistently linked with higher retention (one widely cited study found 70% retention among mentoring participants versus 49% for non-participants), stronger promotion rates, and improved engagement. In Australia, 87% of Gen Z and 86% of millennials rate mentorship from experienced colleagues as a helpful tool for career growth, according to Deloitte's 2025 survey. The strongest evidence comes from documented program outcomes rather than participation counts alone: organisations running structured mentoring, including Brancher clients such as Fletcher Building and Women in Media, report measurable gains in retention, confidence and administrative efficiency.
Mentoring has moved from a nice-to-have to a measured line item in most people strategies. Boards want to see retention numbers. L&D leaders want engagement data. And increasingly, HR teams are being asked to show the return on a mentoring program the same way they'd show the return on any other investment.
This guide pulls together the mentoring statistics in the workplace that hold up under scrutiny: primary research from SHRM, Deloitte, LinkedIn Learning, Gallup, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and peer-reviewed journals, alongside genuine, documented outcomes from Brancher's own case studies. Where the research is mixed or the effect size is modest, we've said so rather than rounding up.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 70% retention for mentoring participants vs 49% for non-participants | Sun Microsystems study, cited via Forbes |
| 54% of workers feel motivated to persevere through career setbacks when they have a mentor or sponsor | SHRM, 2025 |
| 87% of Australian Gen Z and 86% of Australian millennials rate mentorship as a helpful career growth tool | Deloitte Global 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey (Australia) |
| 36% of organisations qualify as "career development champions" using tactics that include mentorship | LinkedIn Learning 2025 Workplace Learning Report |
| Cost of replacing an employee: up to 150% of salary (conservative estimate) | AHRI |
| Voluntary turnover costs US businesses roughly USD 1 trillion a year | Gallup |
| 92% retention in a national mentoring cohort, 80% reduction in admin time | Brancher client case study: Women in Media |
Large-employer mentoring participation has climbed steadily. A 2019 Forbes analysis put the share of Fortune 500 companies with a visible mentoring program at 71%, rising to 84% by 2022. That trajectory has likely continued since, though we haven't found a recent, independently verifiable figure worth quoting as precise.
What's changed more than the headline participation number is how seriously organisations are treating mentoring as a strategic lever rather than a perk. LinkedIn Learning's 2025 Workplace Learning Report, based on a survey of 937 L&D and HR professionals and 679 learners across geographies including Australia, found that only 36% of organisations qualify as "career development champions": those deploying multiple tactics, including structured mentoring, leadership development and internal mobility, in a coordinated way. These champion organisations report stronger profitability, better retention and faster AI adoption than the remaining 64%.
SHRM's research points in a similar direction. In a 2025 report titled The Price of Success: Navigating the Tradeoffs That Shape Career Growth, SHRM found that 54% of workers feel strongly motivated to persevere through career adversity when they have a mentor or sponsor. The same research found that 1 in 5 employees at director level and above reported difficulty finding trusted allies to confide in, and 54% of HR executives now rank coaching and mentoring as the top area for skills improvement among people managers.
Retention is where mentoring's business case is usually made or lost, so it's worth looking at the numbers carefully rather than taking the punchiest figure at face value.
A frequently cited Sun Microsystems study found retention rates averaged 70% for employees who participated in mentoring, compared with 49% for those who didn't. It's an older study and results will vary by organisation, industry and how mentoring is run, but the direction of the finding (mentoring participants stay longer) has been echoed in more recent research too. SHRM's 2025 mentorship research links having a mentor or sponsor to greater resilience through periods of career disruption, which is one plausible mechanism behind the retention effect.
The cost side of the equation is where Australian data helps ground the conversation. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2.3 million people left or lost a job in 2023. AHRI estimates that replacing an employee can cost as much as 150% of their salary once you account for recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity, and Gallup has separately put the annual cost of voluntary turnover to US businesses at around USD 1 trillion. None of these figures are mentoring-specific, but they explain why even a modest, credible improvement in retention through mentoring can represent a meaningful saving, particularly for organisations with several hundred employees.
On engagement specifically, Gallup research puts the average share of a workforce that is actively disengaged in the high teens as a percentage, and separate LinkedIn Learning analysis estimates the cost of an actively disengaged employee at roughly 34% of their salary. Mentoring won't fix disengagement on its own, but structured programs that build in regular development conversations are one of the more evidence-backed levers available to HR and L&D teams trying to move that number.
The oldest and most frequently repeated statistic here traces back to a 2011 Forbes piece: Employees who received mentoring were promoted roughly five times more often than those who didn't, and mentors themselves were around six times more likely to be promoted. It's worth treating this as a widely cited industry figure rather than a precise, current benchmark, since the underlying research is over a decade old.
More recent and locally relevant is Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which included a dedicated Australian country cut. It found that 87% of Australian Gen Z respondents and 86% of Australian millennials rate mentorship and guidance from experienced colleagues as a very or somewhat helpful tool for career growth, comparable to on-the-job learning and ahead of formal training programs. The same survey found a real gap between what these generations want from managers and what they're getting: Australian Gen Z employees said they wanted their manager to teach and mentor them at a considerably higher rate than they reported it actually happening.
Peer-reviewed research offers a more measured picture than the marketing stats usually suggest, and we think that nuance is worth including rather than glossing over. A BMJ Open evaluation of the Franklin Women Mentoring Programme, an Australian cross-organisational program for mid-career women in health and medical research, found meaningful gains in resilience (88% of mentees), ability to have difficult workplace conversations (88% of mentees) and supervisory and team management skills (82% of mentees), along with reported positive impacts on promotions and grant opportunities.
Two influential meta-analyses in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Allen, Eby, Poteet, Lentz & Lima, 2004; and a later cross-domain synthesis by Eby, Allen, Evans, Ng & DuBois, 2008) reached a more cautious conclusion: mentoring is associated with a genuinely wide range of favourable career, attitudinal and relational outcomes, but the effect sizes for objective outcomes like pay and promotion are generally small. In other words, mentoring reliably helps, but it's rarely the single deciding factor in anyone's career, and it works best alongside other supports rather than as a substitute for them.
Peer mentoring, where colleagues at a similar level share knowledge horizontally rather than through a traditional senior-junior structure, has grown partly because it solves a practical problem: there usually aren't enough senior mentors to go around. SHRM's research on mentoring models describes peer-to-peer mentoring as addressing exactly this bottleneck, while cultivating a broader culture of shared learning across departments.
The academic literature on peer and workplace mentoring more broadly is genuinely encouraging, if less dramatic than some marketing statistics imply. The Eby et al. (2008) meta-analytic review found that mentoring is linked to a wide range of positive behavioural, attitudinal and career outcomes, and that effect sizes were, on average, larger for workplace and academic mentoring than for youth mentoring. Kammeyer-Mueller and Judge's (2008) quantitative review similarly found that mentoring has a real, measurable effect on job and career satisfaction, though factors like tenure and core self-evaluations often carry stronger weight for objective career outcomes.
Closer to home, an Australasian Society of Genetic Counselors mentoring program (2024 evaluation) found that 61% of participants rated mentor-mentee matching as excellent, and 44% said they intended to continue the relationship informally after the formal program ended, a reasonable proxy for relationship quality in a peer-professional mentoring context.
Most ROI conversations around mentoring come down to two levers: reduced turnover cost, and reduced disengagement cost. Brancher's own ROI Calculator is built around exactly this logic, and it's a useful starting point if you want to model your own organisation's numbers rather than rely on industry averages.
On the retention side, the calculator uses AHRI's estimate that replacing an employee costs around 150% of salary (a conservative 75% is used as the default working assumption) against the Australian average wage of roughly AUD 90,000, based on ABS earnings data. On the engagement side, it draws on Gallup's workforce disengagement research, and LinkedIn Learning's estimate that a disengaged employee costs around 34% of their salary in lost productivity.
If you want a fuller framework for turning mentoring outcomes into a business case, including how to separate leading indicators (match activation, meeting frequency) from lagging indicators (retention, promotion rate, internal mobility), our guide to mentoring program evaluation walks through a practical ROI formula step by step.
On the platform side, Brancher's own published figures, correct as at the time of writing and verified on the Why Brancher page, show a 97% matching satisfaction score across the platform and an average 82% reduction in the time and effort required to run a mentoring program administratively. These are Brancher-specific figures rather than industry averages, so we've been explicit about that distinction rather than blending them into general mentoring statistics.
Some of the clearest, most specific Australian evidence on mentoring and inclusion comes from the public sector rather than corporate case studies. Transport for NSW's Aboriginal Career Development and Mentoring Program was independently reviewed in 2019 to 2020, and found that 64.3% of participants highly valued the program's impact on their professional and personal development, with more than 90% of mentor respondents saying they'd recommend it to colleagues. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment in the broader Transport cluster grew by around 150% in the years following the program's introduction, alongside other initiatives, which is a meaningfully larger and more Australia-specific data point than most of the DEI statistics typically cited in this space.
The Franklin Women Mentoring Programme evaluation, referenced above, also found strong outcomes specifically for women's inclusion and career progression in the health and medical research sector, with 96% of mentees reporting improved knowledge and skills related to being more inclusive.
We'd note, as we did in the career advancement section, that peer-reviewed research on mentoring and DEI outcomes tends to show real but modest effects rather than transformational ones. That's a more honest starting point for setting expectations with leadership than the larger, less rigorously sourced percentage claims that circulate in some industry content.
Industry-wide statistics are useful for building a business case, but documented, verifiable outcomes from real programs tend to be more persuasive, and they're the fairest way to answer a question like "which organisations have proven success with mentoring."
Fletcher Building Australia needed to scale mentoring for a high-potential talent community without expanding administrative overhead. Using a structured, self-service model built on Brancher, including self-directed matching and automated nudges, the program saw every participant report increased confidence, new skills and stronger support, with 80% of pairs meeting six or more times.
Women in Media scaled a state-based pilot into a national program spanning 183 matched pairs across five-plus cohorts. The national cohort achieved 100% match satisfaction, 92% retention, and an 80% reduction in the administrative burden of running the program, while mentees reported meaningful progress against their career goals.
These aren't industry averages. They're specific, documented results from named organisations, and we think that's a more useful answer to "does mentoring actually work here" than another repetition of the Fortune 500 statistic.
LinkedIn Learning's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found only 36% of organisations currently qualify as "career development champions" using coordinated tactics that include structured mentoring, though those that do report stronger retention and profitability. In Australia specifically, Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found 87% of Gen Z and 86% of millennials rate mentorship from experienced colleagues as a helpful career growth tool, and SHRM research found 54% of employees feel more able to push through career setbacks when they have a mentor or sponsor.
A widely cited Sun Microsystems study found 70% retention among mentoring participants compared with 49% for non-participants. SHRM's 2025 research links having a mentor or sponsor to greater resilience through career disruption, one plausible mechanism behind that retention gap. In Australia, the ABS reports 2.3 million people left or lost a job in 2023, and AHRI estimates replacing an employee can cost up to 150% of salary, which is why even modest retention gains from mentoring tend to represent a meaningful saving.
Rather than relying on industry averages, the clearest evidence tends to come from documented individual program outcomes. Fletcher Building Australia's mentoring program, run through Brancher, saw 80% of pairs meet six or more times with every participant reporting increased confidence. Women in Media's national mentoring program achieved 100% match satisfaction and 92% retention in its national cohort. More broadly, Forbes-sourced data shows the share of Fortune 500 companies with a visible mentoring program rose from 71% in 2019 to 84% in 2022, and has likely continued climbing since.
The two clearest ROI levers are reduced turnover cost and reduced disengagement cost. AHRI estimates the cost of replacing an employee at up to 150% of salary, Gallup research puts voluntary turnover's cost to US businesses at around USD 1 trillion a year, and LinkedIn Learning estimates a disengaged employee costs roughly 34% of their salary in lost productivity. Brancher's own ROI Calculator lets you model these figures against your own headcount and salary data rather than relying on generic benchmarks.
A frequently cited (though older) Forbes-sourced figure found mentored employees were promoted around five times more often than non-mentored peers, with mentors themselves around six times more likely to be promoted. More rigorous peer-reviewed meta-analyses (Allen et al., 2004; Eby et al., 2008) found consistently positive but generally modest effect sizes for objective outcomes like promotion and pay, suggesting mentoring helps career advancement meaningfully but rarely acts alone. Australia's Franklin Women Mentoring Programme evaluation similarly reported positive impacts on promotions and grant opportunities for participating mid-career women.
For primary, non-vendor research, SHRM, Gallup, LinkedIn Learning's Workplace Learning Report and the Australian HR Institute (AHRI) all publish relevant workforce and retention cost data. Peer-reviewed synthesis is available through journals like the Journal of Applied Psychology (searchable via PubMed or PMC), which has published several meta-analyses on mentoring's career and organisational outcomes. For a practical, Australia-specific starting point, Brancher's ROI Calculator and our guide to mentoring program evaluation both walk through how to build your own ROI case using AHRI, ABS and Gallup benchmarks.
Sources referenced throughout: Forbes; SHRM (shrm.org); Deloitte Global 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey (Australian country cut); LinkedIn Learning 2025 Workplace Learning Report; Gallup; Australian Bureau of Statistics; Australian HR Institute (AHRI); BMJ Open (Franklin Women Mentoring Programme evaluation, 2021); Journal of Applied Psychology meta-analyses (Allen et al., 2004; Eby et al., 2008; Kammeyer-Mueller & Judge, 2008); NSW Public Sector Commission (State of the NSW Public Sector Report 2021); Genetics in Medicine Open (2024).
Holly Brailsford is Co-Founder and CEO of Brancher and a registered organisational psychologist. Holly writes about the research and data behind effective mentoring program design, drawing on Brancher's work with organisations across Australia's corporate, government and not-for-profit sectors.