What is Mentoring?
Simply put, mentoring and mentorship is a professional relationship between you and a person who has agreed to help mentor you as part of your career development. This will involve them sharing their advice and experience with you. Mentoring can be an effective way of helping people to progress in their careers. A mentor is a guide who can help the mentee to find the right direction and who can help them to develop solutions to career issues. Mentoring provides the mentee with an opportunity to think about career options and progress. Often, mentors are people who are further along than you in their career paths that have benefited from having a mentor in their own lives and want to pass the opportunity on to you.
How Can You get a mentor?
Many universities and large companies have formal mentoring schemes as do some professional bodies and organisations. So make enquiries / do some research if you are unsure of what is already available to you. If there is not a formal mentoring scheme this doesn’t mean that you can look to use these contacts/connections to find a mentor.
The important thing to remember is that in each case someone is giving up their personal time. Therefore, the mentor/mentee relationship should be mutually beneficial to both participants. While it may be hard to see the results of your efforts right away, you should find that over time there are many people out there who are ready to have your back and help you succeed. While they may not have the formal title of “your mentor” they are likely to be providing you with advice and sharing their experiences.
How mentoring can help you in your career?
As mentioned above a mentor can give advice and insights as well as sharing their experience that you may be able to use in your own career. You should be recording the things that you learn from your mentor (and the advice that they give you) in your career journal as you never know when it might be useful. As well as general conversations, they are also often available for offering help with preparing for interviews and practising difficult conversations.
A mentor to help guide you through your job/career path. A good mentor can give you a huge leg up and is a professional relationship that comes with a long list of great benefits. If you are lucky enough to have a formal/good mentoring relationship – make sure that you make the most of the opportunity. The easiest way to make sure that you make the most of the mentoring relationship is to make sure that you have goals. Having a goal will help drive the relationship forward.
Use your career journal to plan, monitor and record your mentoring relationships.
If mentoring is something you are looking to explore and you want to read more about it – check out our mentoring series on networking tips for beginners.