— The Forgotten Workforce
Mentoring for the forgotten workforce
76% of people want a mentor. Only 37% have one. The gap doesn’t fall where most people think.
Walk into any organisation and ask where the personal development budget goes. It goes to the managers. The revenue generators. The team leaders. The high potentials. The people already on a trajectory someone decided was worth investing in.
Now look around that same organisation more carefully.
Find the apprentice who is three months in and has no idea what their next five years look like. The personal assistant who manages an executive’s entire working life but has nobody managing their growth. The admin coordinator who keeps three departments running but sits outside every development conversation.
Ask any of them when someone last invested in their personal growth. The answer, almost universally, is never. Not because they don’t deserve it. Not because they aren’t capable of extraordinary things. But because the systems we have built for personal development were never designed with them in mind.
That is the gap Ten Mentors was built to fill.
The numbers that should change how every business thinks about development
32%
Reduction in turnover
23%
Increase in satisfaction
5x
More likely to be promoted
6x
Return on investment
These numbers represent what happens when mentoring works. The question is who is it working for? The answer, in most organisations, is the same group it has always worked for. Not the forgotten workforce. Not the people this page is about.
Who the forgotten workforce really is
The term is not about pay grade. It is not about job title. It is not about how essential someone is. It is about invisibility in the development conversation.
The apprentice
Learning a trade or a role, but with nobody developing the person behind it. Given tasks. Not given direction.
The personal assistant
Whose competence is assumed and whose ambition is invisible. Managing everything for everyone else, with nothing managed for them.
The admin coordinator
Who hold the infrastructure of organisations together and are routinely the last to receive any development resource.
The care worker
Doing some of the most physically and emotionally demanding work in the economy, with the least structured support for their own wellbeing.
The marketing assistant
Executing other people’s strategies without anyone helping them build their own.
The builder
Whose expertise is undeniable and whose personal development has been nobody’s concern since they finished their training.
What these people share is not a salary band. It is the experience of showing up every day in a system that was not built to develop them. That ends here.
Give the forgotten workforce a place to start
The Ten Mentors box is a simple, tangible starting point for the people every development budget overlooks. Bring it to your team, or sponsor it for those who need it most.