Mentee 🧑🎓 Day 23 - Networking Advent Calendar
The Networking Advent Calendar is a 24-day long training program to build your networking muscles (and your network)! Not sure why you should do this? Missed Day 1? Read more here.
Day 23: Create a plan with your mentor, as a mentee
I have been thinking about looking for a mentor but my problem hast been a little that my interests are still so wide and vague… I don’t know who to ask.
I’m really excited to speak to my mentor, but I don’t know what to ask or talk about so that I don’t waste their time.
Mentoring can be extremely powerful in your career. But it’s not easy to be a mentee. These are real quotes from jobseekers I’ve spoken to. You’re asking for the mentor’s time on a regular basis, and the mentor holds a senior leadership position of a well-known startup. How can you make the best out of a mentoring relationship?
This is a question I also had in my mentoring journey. If you’ve found a mentor from our past newsletter issues, the task today is to create a plan for your mentoring. From my research (and personal experiences), these are some tips that worked best.
Set goals
Your main goal could be that you want to land a job in their field, and that can be broken down into smaller and more specific goals:
Understand what it’s like to work in their field
Understand the skills needed for their field
Get to know interesting companies in their field
Find out about the biggest challenges in their field
Write the “job description” of your ideal mentor
Harvard Business Review offered a great tip: think of the type of person that can help you achieve the goals you wrote down.
Perhaps you need someone that can help you accomplish a project, make introductions to people at a certain level within a specific industry, or coach you through a tough negotiation. In your job description, make sure to also include the “why” – just like companies want potential hires to understand the bigger purpose of their firm, explain why mentoring you will tap into something bigger.
This relationship is not a therapy session
NPR’s post on mentoring offered two brilliant tips.
Remember to make and keep boundaries. We are human, and often personal issues will come into play during your sessions, especially if you have a pre-existing relationship or are talking about work-life balance. It's okay to vent. But make sure not to monopolize the session with personal issues or make it only about venting.
Consider establishing a board of mentors
Mentors also have their fields of expertise and their unique way of mentoring. There won’t be a single person that can help answer all of your career questions. I currently speak to one mentor on a biweekly basis but have been speaking to 3 other mentors here and there. One of them is highly empathetic and has been through the same challenges as me. The other is working at a well-established company leading a large team. One person can better sympathize with my needs but the other can give me more reference points of potential career paths.
Even if a formal mentorship period ends, keep these mentors in your life and updated of your achievements and pitfalls. They can be a guide when you're unsure and will feel appreciated that they helped you get to the place you're at in your career. Win-win!
Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!