Let's do some mentoring
June 3rd, 2021 - 3 minute read
Background
I have always had a keen interest in supporting others, whether through my day job or volunteering roles that I have been lucky to be part of. A couple of noteworthy examples would be helping to run a kids code club and being a student mentor with the Salford foundation for children in Years 8 and 9 which was great fun.
I work for a company called Infinity Works and we have recently partnered with Generation.org to offer a number of data engineering courses to young people who are either unemployed or come from underprivileged backgrounds, in order to help them start a career in tech. At the end of the 12 week programme, Generation asked whether anyone from Infinity Works would be keen to volunteer their time to mentor a student in order to support them in finding their first job and preparing them for a life in tech. This seemed like a fantastic thing to do as well as something I would enjoy. Not only would I have the opportunity to genuinley help a talented young individual, I would also be able to do something I have never done before, helping someone before they have even got into a career in tech.
Where to start?
Finding the right mentor is a really difficult task and in my opinion, always works best when the relationship is formed naturally through working together in some way. I believe there are three key questions to ask yourself:
Have you got a good connection with them?
Do they have the right skills and experience to help you?
Do they really want to do it?
I am sure in future blogs, I will come back and revisit some of these things.
A mentorship is a mutually beneficial professional relationship in which an experienced individual (the mentor) imparts knowledge, expertise and wisdom to a less experienced person (the mentee), while simultaneously honing their mentoring skills.
Obviously in this instance, this wasn’t to be the case. In order to aid with this matching therefore, each mentor and mentee was required to complete a bio as well as answering specific questions such as “what do you want to get from this experience?” and “what are the key areas you are passionate about and feel you can provide value in?”. The matching process kicked in and I was paired with a young man called Andrei.
The programme
The Generation mentoring programme is supported through a software platform called Chronus and I was really pleased upon logging in, to see that the Generation team had already added a 9 week mentoring plan and also provided us with a mentors guide which was a detailed PDF giving us ideas and guidance for each of these sessions.
Here was the original outline:
Session 1: Getting to know each other
Session 2: Project Showcase
Session 3: CV Essentials
Session 4: Self Awareness
Session 5: Interviewing
Session 6: Optimising Linked In
Session 7: Job Seeking Tips & Tricks
Session 8: Maintaining the momentum
Session 9: Action Plan & Wrap Up
Through a series of 5 further blog posts, I am going to talk about some of these sessions, what we both got out of them and most importantly, the core parts of advice as I saw them.
Hope you enjoy reading about this experience