Success Stories

Overview

The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) partnered with Next Level Mentoring across three consecutive years to deliver structured mentoring programs supporting leadership development, career growth, and organisational connection.

Across 2023, 2024, and 2025, the programs supported 65 mentoring pairs, producing consistently high satisfaction, strong goal achievement, deep cross-department relationships, and significant internal career mobility.

This three-year evaluation demonstrates not a single successful cohort, but a repeatable, high-performing leadership development system.

This case study focuses on 4 key areas across the 3 programs

4 key areas

1. Career acceleration
2. Program satisfaction
3. Mentoring relationships
4. Building a culture of mentoring

“A huge thank you to Darren McFarlane and Next Level Mentoring for delivering such an outstanding program for us at DWER.

Over the past three years, we’ve seen incredible growth—not only in participation but in impact. Both mentors and mentees are realising tangible benefits: building confidence, expanding networks, and developing leadership capability.

The inclusion of our Executive team has taken the program to new heights, reinforcing a culture of learning and collaboration that strengthens our organisation for the future.”

Michelle Raymond, Manager of Talent & Culture, DWER

“Bringing in outside expertise from NLM helped increase the credibility of the program for the participants – more so than if it was run internally. This played a role in the program's success”  - Chris McGrath, Woodside mentoring pilot program owner

When Woodside partnered with Next Level Mentoring, the goal was to strengthen leadership capability and connection across the business. Through our structured mentoring framework, participants gained practical skills, improved collaboration, and delivered measurable results. This case study shows how a well-designed mentoring program can lift engagement, retention, and organisational culture — even in complex, large-scale environments.

Woodside, Australia’s leading natural gas producer, drives a philosophy that being a leader is not limited to a job title or reporting line. The organisation is investing heavily in the development of its people, through Navigator – its whole-of-business leadership development program - to equip Woodside with the skills for all that lies ahead, while building the trust, transparency and courage to underpin a stronger, more capable and enabled organisation.

As part of its commitment to leadership development, Woodside partnered with Next Level Mentoring (NLM) to develop a new mentoring pilot program that would sit alongside Navigator.

The pilot program ran for six months in 2021 and saw 30 mentees selected from Woodside’s engineering department paired with mentors from the organisation’s leadership community.

The feedback from the program was positive:

• The average feedback score was 4.6/5.
• 97% of surveyed participants wanted to be involved in next years mentoring program.

Together NLM and Woodside achieved great results, largely due to the design team’s:

1. Use of a mentee-led matching process which allowed the mentees to select their own mentor rather than someone being assigned for them.
2. Promotion of the program within Woodside through multimedia channels such as emails, presentations, videos and webinars to drive interest. As a result, registration was oversubscribed: People were keen.
3. Delivery of training webinars and simple guidance beforehand to help increase the effectiveness of the participant’s mentoring meetings.

Once the mentoring program was up and running, Woodsiders achieved three big wins:

1. Boosting their development by being involved in a formal Woodside mentoring program that focused on goals they would like to achieve.
2. Improving their skills by being paired with an experienced leader.
3. Increasing their connection across the company and exposing themselves to new ways of thinking.

Woodside pilot program owner Chris McGrath said he was pleased with the decision to partner with NLM:

“Bringing in outside expertise from NLM helped increase the credibility of the program for the participants – more so than if it was run internally. This played a role in the program Woodside's success,” he said.

Woodside’s Acting VP of Engineering, Mike Stock said that while the mentee-led process was new to the company, it had worked very well.

“It helped start the program in the right direction, giving mentees more ownership of the mentoring process. Both the mentors and mentees really liked this aspect of the program,”

Woodside’s VP of People and Global Capability, Jacky Connolly said:

“Initiatives like mentoring programs help Woodside provide additional value for our employees and their development.

Mentoring enables our people to drive their own development, seek input from others and share ideas. In fact, often the mentor and mentee both get a great deal out the relationship.

By placing some structure in the selection of mentors and ensuring connection to Navigator, we really unlocked the value of this pilot.”