Find a Mentor

It’s with good reason that mentoring is a popular career-furthering strategy. Mentors can share their experiences, introduce you to their networks and senior industry figures and guide you through challenging situations that will inevitably arise throughout your career. They might even see areas of improvement for you that you hadn’t even considered!

Only a person overly passionate about his or her job will turn out to be a good mentor. Passion is very important early in the career and hence associating with someone who has passion for what they are doing will go a long way,” said Samir Khadepaun, co-founder, Mobikon Technologies.

A mentor can give you:

• advice based on their experience
• tips for increasing your skills
• information about an industry or job
• encouragement and support to pursue or create opportunities
• someone to bounce ideas off.

You don’t have to follow the same job path as your mentor. But it can be useful to find out what they did, why they did it and what the results were of taking this path.

The key ingredients to finding a mentor (and keeping them!)

There’s a few things that all mentoring relationships should include, whether you’re in IT and looking to break into a new field, a financial planner looking for techniques to expand their portfolio, or a senior executive looking for guidance on how to transform workplace culture.

Organisational skills

Your mentor will likely be someone senior; someone who is often busy with various high-level responsibilities. As such, being disorganised and late won’t work when looking for a lasting mentoring relationship. Alternatively, always being proactive and prepared shows respect, and means that time spent together can be used most efficiently.

Regular communication

Whether it’s in person, via email or over the phone, regular communication is vital to strengthening mentor-mentee relationship and tracking progress and success. While all forms of communication are good, we recommend a combination of face-to-face and digital.

Transparency

If you’re not willing to be honest and upfront with your mentor, then you’ll likely not achieve the goals you set out to. Transparency allows you to talk with your mentor candidly about the issues central to your career and progression. It will also help you discover the most efficient and productive way of working together.

Resilience

A large component of mentoring relationships is the exchange of feedback and criticism. Be resilient and use criticism constructively, channelling it into self-improvement and renewed approaches to work and projects.

Flexibility

An exciting, and indeed, often challenging part of having a mentor is that tasks given to you might produce outcomes you didn’t anticipate. Be open to different ways of doing things, be flexible in adjusting to how meetings are run, and always try new ways of planning.

Find Multiple Mentors

Nobody is perfect. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Hence, it is best to choose multiple mentors. “You may not find everything you need in one person. Feel free to choose different mentors to counsel and guide you on various aspects of your professional life,” says Sriram.