Mentoring Skills
Signature Course No. 47 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Mentoring Skills course, in the Management Development category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
This is the course for managers and senior professionals asked to mentor, experienced practitioners with something real to pass on, and informal mentors who want a discipline. You sit in the mentor's chair throughout. It works in the order the work has to happen: first, Module 1 — The Relationship: What Mentoring Is, and How It Begins — tell mentoring apart from managing and from coaching and therapy, contract the relationship with its purpose, terms, confidentiality and edges, and end date stated aloud, build trust on purpose, listen for the person before the problem, question instead of telling, run the first conversation, keep the goals the mentee's own, finishing with The Relationship, Contracted; then, Module 2 — The Craft: Experience Shared Well, and Ending Well — share experience without cloning, give feedback that is true, kind, and usable, challenge without crushing, name stalls instead of carrying them, hold boundaries of time, access, and dependency, refer on when a struggle exceeds mentoring, keep the middle conversations in rhythm, end the relationship on purpose, and sign your own mentor's standard, finishing with The Mentoring, Completed. You finish by proving the whole course — in The Relationship, Contracted and in The Mentoring, Completed. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
The fences, stated plainly. Mentoring is not managing, coaching, or therapy. The mentee owns the direction; the mentor owns the honesty. What is said in mentoring stays in mentoring — except where safety, law, or serious harm requires it to move, and then it moves openly. And when the struggle is beyond mentoring, the mentor's job is to refer on — to the manager, to HR, or to professional help — not to carry it alone. The course also makes no claims it cannot keep: it names no studies, prints no statistics, and promises no percentages about what mentoring does to careers or organisations.
This is the forty-seventh course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person training Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
Already enrolled? Enter the course →
Know the Chairs → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Know the Chairs
The Coach starts by examining the mentoring you actually do — which chair you sit in, what your conversations really consist of, and where the drift into managing, coaching, or carrying begins. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Relationship, Contracted for Module 1 and The Mentoring, Completed for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Most mentoring fails politely. Two people meet, the senior one talks about his own career for an hour, the junior one nods, and both leave calling it mentoring. Nothing was contracted, nothing was asked, nothing changed. This course teaches the craft underneath the title: what mentoring is and what it is not, how to agree the work before you begin it, how to listen and question instead of telling, how to share experience so it frees the mentee instead of cloning the mentor, how to give feedback and challenge inside the relationship, how to hold boundaries and confidentiality with their edges stated honestly, how to recognise the moment a struggle belongs somewhere else and refer it on, and how to end the relationship on purpose instead of letting it fade. You will sit in the mentor's chair throughout: every exercise puts a mentee in front of you and grades what you do, not what you admire.
What you will learn
- Tell mentoring apart from managing, coaching, and therapy — and hold its boundaries
- Contract a mentoring relationship, build trust, and listen before you tell
- Share experience, give feedback, and challenge without cloning or carrying the mentee
- Refer on when the work exceeds mentoring, and end the relationship well
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Mentoring Skills, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Relationship, Contracted and The Mentoring, Completed
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for people asked to mentor
Mentoring Skills is for managers and senior professionals asked to mentor — the experienced person a junior colleague, a new hire, or the organisation itself has pointed at a mentee, usually with no training and no terms; experienced practitioners with something real to pass on, whose hard-won judgment is valuable exactly in proportion to how well they can share it without imposing it; informal mentors who want a discipline — the colleague everyone already goes to; and professionals who develop other mentors: tell mentoring apart from managing, coaching, and therapy, contract the relationship, listen before you tell, and refer on and end well.
The learner sits in the mentor's chair throughout: every exercise puts a mentee in front of you and grades what you do, not what you admire. The course assumes you have experience worth sharing and a person in front of you; it does not assume anyone ever taught you what to do in the chair.
Prefer to train live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Relationship, Contracted
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Mentoring Skills is Signature Course No. 47. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.