Mentor🪜Day 4 - Networking Advent Calendar
Finding a power supporter for your career is actually surprisingly easy
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 or missed Day 1, read here; to read Day 5, go here.
Day 4: Schedule a mentoring call
To progress in your career, it is essential to receive guidance and advice from people who have walked your path before. When I looked back at my career, if it wasn’t for my mentors, Joyce and Dan, who were experienced recruiters with 10+ years of experience, I wouldn’t have been able to learn as quickly as I did.
Mentors also give you access. If there are opportunities in their network, they could potentially introduce you. In some cases, your mentor could also become your sponsor. A sponsor may be able to put your name up for a promotion or advocate for your work when you’re not in the room.
Your challenge for today: find a mentor using the Mentoring Club and schedule a call with them. The Mentoring Club is a non-profit platform for anyone to find mentoring in their field. You could search for mentors in 23 fields including finance, data science, UX research and design, HR and recruiting, and startup founding.
To make your mentoring call most productive, prepare 2-3 specific questions in advance. If the call goes well, don’t be afraid to ask for recurring mentoring calls. I personally had 2 calls with 2 mentors from the website, and both were incredibly open and helpful. One mentor suggested to have a follow-up call.
Finally, don’t forget to thank them for their time, and ask if there’s anything you can help them with in return. You’ll never know how much you can help others!
Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!