As a young professional looking to get their feet wet in an industry, it’s common knowledge that opportunities to rack up experience are valuable. While it’s true that a strong work ethic, certifications, and degrees are all great tools for furthering your career and achieving your goals, experience can do a career and one’s skillset a whole lot of good. However, immersion in various working opportunities can only go to a certain extent in helping refine your skills, abilities, and various professional traits.
This is where getting a mentor to help you out is especially valuable.
The Reality of Mentorship
As valuable as experience and credentials are for furthering your career, nothing tops the difference that actual guidance and insight from someone who’s been where you want to be brings.
Even after dedicating yourself to refining your skills, training your capabilities, and learning constantly, it is still possible to feel stuck in your career path. This is specifically the reason the opportunity to confer with a mentor has become especially valuable over the years because of how it helps even the most seasoned professionals further their careers with ease.
Whether you’re in the IT, finance, marketing, or engineering field, having a mentor to help you will always prove to be an opportunity well worth investing in. Through back-and-forth discussions and constant advice, any professional will be able to further their careers with an experienced professional in their corner!
Why Such an Opportunity Is Important
With all this talk about the impact of mentorship and how it helps transform both lives and careers, the chances are that you’re wondering about what makes it so important in the first place.
Regardless if you’re at a crossroads or simply looking to get as many things done right the first time as possible, the idea of mentorship will always be important because of the opportunities it brings. Aside from taking in insights from someone who has decades of expertise in their field, mentors are vital because they have a network of business professionals that yield openings to further your career!
Another critical factor that makes mentors so important is that they are willing to share what and who they know, bringing some serious progress to your career in more ways than one. The more time you spend learning from your mentor, the more steps ahead you’ll be able to take ahead of your past self and other hyper-competitive professionals in your industry!
Taking Advantage of Mentorship
When it comes to taking advantage of the concept and opportunity of mentorship, it goes without saying that progress begins by finding the very person to help you out.
Generally, spotting a professional who can guide and mold you into the professional that you aspire to be begins by searching around for mentorship programs and opportunities in your industry. This can be done by searching online, asking your supervisors or bosses at work, or even signing up for Hackatahon’s Masterclass that puts you face-to-face with the best experts!
Once you’ve found a professional or industry veteran who can guide you along the paths of career, skills, and personal development, here are some things you can do to take advantage of and maximize the opportunity at hand:
- List your goals
- Establish what is expected from mentee and mentor
- Identify the frequency of meetings
- Identify how the success of mentoring will be measured
- Agree on ground rules—such as confidentiality and giving/receiving feedback
- Get to know your mentor (and allow them to get to know you)
- Share what you hope to get out of the mentorship, especially when it comes to things you’re particularly interested in
- Share your feedback from any assessment
- Share any areas of development you are working on (and ask if they've run into similar challenges in their career and what they've done to address them)
Among the different tools that you can use to best excel in your field and grow as a professional, mentorship programs will always prove to be one of the most effective tools that you can use. Once you commit yourself to be mentored by a professional, you’ll get to help your skills, mindset, and capabilities flourish as well as they should in no time!
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