How British Airways built a skills-based mentoring programme in eight weeks

Why a skills matrix beats a coordinator's memory

For years, British Airways ran mentoring the way many organisations do, through a coordinator matching people from memory and instinct. It worked well enough for small groups, but the model struggled to scale. Matches depended on the coordinator happening to know both people involved, which limited the pool of mentors and mentees who could take part. In order to grow, BA needed to build something more structured – something that reached far beyond head office. 

When the team began planning Wings, its network for women in leadership, ambition ran ahead of infrastructure. The team wanted a programme that connected senior leaders with colleagues across the airline based entirely on the skills each person could offer or wanted to build. The challenge was building a matching approach precise enough to work at scale, while staying simple enough to roll out to around 100 colleagues within eight weeks.

A skills language everyone understood

Thrive Mentoring gave British Airways skills-based matching, introduced to a leadership audience already familiar with Thrive. Thrive's Customer Success team ran workshops to explain how the matching worked and build confidence in the new approach. From there, the biggest task was defining the skills that mattered most to Wings, narrowing an initial list of fifty down to ten core areas. 

Once the skills were defined, building the programme inside Thrive was straightforward. The team created a dedicated Space for Wings, bringing mentoring, guidance and additional resources into one place. Mentors and mentees completed short profiles, rated their skills against the ten core areas, and were matched automatically. Video content sat directly on the page, playable without leaving the site.

Connections that would not have happened otherwise

Since launch, Wings has produced 70 mentoring matches from an eligible audience of around 100 colleagues, connecting senior leaders with operational colleagues across cabin crew and engineering teams. Around 15% of colleagues who completed the programme returned to the platform afterwards and raised at least one skill rating by a full level, without even being asked to. 

Feedback keeps landing on two things: how effortless the platform made connections feel, and how sharp the resulting matches turned out to be. Mentors and mentees from entirely different corners of the business – who might never have crossed paths  – have been paired purely on shared skills. BA is now watching these relationships play out over the next couple of years, tracking career moves and mobility between departments. 

Wings has become British Airways' blueprint for mentoring at scale, built entirely on skill.