What Makes Mentorship So Valuable

Mentorship has played a very crucial role in my own career thus far, as I'm sure it does for a vast majority of young professionals. I've been fortunate enough to have worked with some really thoughtful leaders over the years - both in and out of the workplace - who've guided me along. Here are some of the ways I believe structured mentorship can make a significant difference in someone's professional life.

1. The Benefit of Hindsight

The biggest value mentors bring is that you can learn from their past decisions — both good and bad. Your mentors tend to have more experience than you. They've been around the block, so to speak. They’ve been in your shoes and have had to face many of the same decisions and struggles that you face today. Whether it’s about planning out the next 10 years of your career or learning how to better manage your time, they’ve likely been where you are and can guide you in the right direction.

The best part is that you don’t need to blindly follow their footsteps! You can learn from their decisions and create a completely different path for yourself. Everyone is guided by a different value system. Everyone has different motivations. You may or may not share the same guiding principles as your mentor, but understanding why they made certain decisions and how those decisions panned out for them can help you make better decisions for yourself.

Pulling in an example specifically from the tech world, your mentor might be a really skilled programmer who decided to pursue technical leadership opportunities, only to later realize they wanted something different. Or they might have decided to go down the management route and then realized they didn't quite enjoy the responsibility as much as they anticipated. Or they might realize that they totally love it! In any case, the important thing for you is to understand how each of those decisions shaped their career over the course of time.

They can also talk to you about things that, while important in the long run, may not be front and center in your mind right now. For example, how does the increased responsibility affect their personal lives? Are there certain skills that they still lack that they wish they'd picked up earlier in their careers? The key thing to remember is that your mentors have the crucial benefit of hindsight, and it is your job to make the most of it.

2. Identifying Your Blind Spots

This is another theme I’ve noticed with most of the mentors I’ve had, and especially the ones really early in my career. Good mentors provide you with an unbiased, third party perspective of your strengths and weaknesses. This is especially useful when you’re just starting out and, in a sense, don’t even know what you don’t know. When you're trying to make sense of everything you need to learn on your first job, both technical and otherwise, a little guidance goes a very long way.

Mentors can identify gaps in your skill set and help you prioritize things you need to work on the most. Great mentors go further and actively give you opportunities to build those skills. In my first ever job as a newbie intern developer, I was paired with a really thoughtful mentor who had been in the business for a while. In my very first week at work, he built me a handbook of sorts that covered a list of topics he’d want me to focus on week by week for as long as I worked with him.

These were the things he felt he expected every junior developer to know. I wouldn’t be tested on this, but he tried to make sure that the work I was being given kept increasing in complexity week by week and tied at least little bit to a specific concept. This seemed a bit university-like at the time, and maybe that was the point, but in hindsight I appreciate the effort he put into making sure I had a solid foundation of programming concepts, in a format that wasn't too intimidating.

I've had subsequent mentors who've focused not just on helping me build my technical skillset but also on my soft skills. This is also the area I suspect most people need an outsider perspective. It is fairly easy to figure out what technical skills are missing from your resume. It is not that straightforward to pinpoint an issue with the way you communicate, the way you carry yourself or the way you collaborate with others. These are all things a good mentor can help you identify and improve over time. By gently nudging me to voice my opinions more, or pushing me out of my comfort zone, my mentors over the years have helped me become just a little more confident in the workplace.

3. Creating Role Models

Your mentors don’t always communicate with you through their words, they also communicate through their actions. There are plenty of skills that I’ve come to appreciate that I then try to emulate and develop myself. It could be something as trivial as their work ethic, or the way they are able to deliver critical feedback in a positive, encouraging manner without sounding obnoxious. Or maybe the way they're able to engage with diverse stakeholders. These are all skills that you need to developer for yourself at some point, but there isn’t a handbook on it. It’s only by observing someone else can you decide what skills you’d like to keep for yourself.

And for better or worse, age is a huge factor that plays into this as well. When we think of mentorship we tend to think of someone much older and much further along in their careers, often with 20-30 years of experience under their belt. But this doesn't always need to be the case. You can benefit from mentors who may even be just a little more experienced than yourself. In fact, at times, they might even understand you better since they're more likely to be in tune with your immediate concerns and experiences. They can help you find a balance between your short term struggles and long term vision for yourself.

When I was about to graduate and step into the "real world" not too long ago, I did benefit from mentorship and advice from industry experts and more "seasoned" professionals, but I also hoped to get the perspective of more recent graduates. They, I felt, could provide me with better guidance on navigating the job market.

Which then leads me to the inverse point: You don't need to attain a certain "level" to start being a useful mentor either! There is always someone who's just a step behind who could benefit from your experience and guidance. It's never too early to start cultivating your own mentorship skills. If anything, working on being a better mentor can indirectly force you to improve on other aspects, such as your communication and leadership skills!