Meet the Team
Darren McFarlane
Founder and Director
Darren is an engineer who fell in love with mentoring. And never looked back.
For over 20 years he has worked in the energy industry and led teams across the UK, Asia and Australia. He helped build an office in Australia and grew it to 50 people, delivering some of the largest engineering projects in the country. He was selected for a global leadership program at INSEAD that was run in Paris, Singapore and San Fransisco.
But the thing that shaped him the most wasn't a project or a course. It was having a mentor.
Nicola McFarlane
Executive Manager
Nicola is an experienced executive leader with more than 25 years of experience across industry, government and consulting in Australia and internationally. A Mechanical Engineer with First Class Honours and Australian Institute of Company Directors Course GAICD graduate, Nicola has held senior leadership roles including CEO, COO and Government Director, leading organisations and multidisciplinary teams through growth, change and complex strategic challenges.
Throughout her career, Nicola has been passionate about developing people, building high-performing teams and helping individuals realise their potential. She brings this experience to Next Level Mentoring, supporting organisations to create meaningful mentoring connections that strengthen capability, confidence, career development and organisational culture.
Why Darren started Next Level Mentoring
When Darren looked back at his career, he realised something. The periods where he grew the most, as a leader and as a person, were always connected to mentoring. Either having a mentor, being a mentor, or helping to run a mentoring program.
But he also realised how rare that experience was. Most organisations either don't have mentoring programs, or they have ones that don't really work. People get paired up, left to figure it out, and the whole thing quietly fizzles out after a few months.
And people struggle to get into mentoring. Either too scared to ask someone to be their mentor.
Or waiting to be asked by someone else.
So Darren applied the same thinking he had used as an engineer to something that most organisations treat as soft and unstructured. He built a mentoring framework that actually works. One that produces results you can measure and a culture you can feel.
That's what NLM does. We build the human infrastructure that turns your experienced leaders into the mentors your next generation of leaders need.
"We build the human infrastructure that turns your experienced leaders into the mentors your next generation of leaders need."
40+ years in leadership
400+ people trained in mentoring
95+ people coached for goals
What we have learnt along the way
We have now helped design and deliver mentoring programs for ASX20 companies and state government departments. We have trained over 400 professionals and coached more than 95 people one-on-one through goal-setting sessions. We have watched mentees get promoted, mentors rediscover their purpose, and entire departments shift their culture because they invested in their people.
The program we built with the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation is now into its 4th consecutive years, growing from 16 pairs to 30, with a 39% promotion rate among mentees and the Director General personally volunteering as a mentor. Every year it's been oversubscribed.
When you give mentoring the structure and support it deserves, extraordinary things happen.
