Knowledge Sharing and Mentorship: Reflections and Experience

Knowledge Power and Mentorship

I always believed in the power of knowledge sharing.

When I was growing up as a young girl, I liked watching a science show called "Knowledge Power " show by Ernie Baron , that was historically known as a best educational TV program in the Philippines back in the 1990s. I cannot forget his tagline, "Knowledge is Power" and that stick into my mind as a young student back then and until now as an adult. It relates to what I wrote last year about how continuous learning as an integral part of a programmer's development on my Medium blog.

In this modern generation where we are right now, there are so many ways for us to share knowledge! You can get proper education and pay for it. You can also learn for free nowadays - the only cost you need to invest is finding time!

My point here you can transfer and share knowledge through mentoring others as well - either as a mentor or a mentee. You don't have to be best of everything to start sharing knowledge through mentorship. You can mentor and share about anything - technical and non-technical.

So what does mentorship means to me?

By definition, mentoring is a relationship between two people with the goal of?professional and personal development. The "mentor" is usually an experienced individual who shares knowledge, experience, and advice with a less experienced person, or "mentee."

Personally, to me, mentorship is what I described as its abbreviation below, that I also shared on my recent collaboration chat and Q&A with CSForSuccess and Equal IT moderated by Ellie King .

This is how I describe mentorship in short.

? M - Mission statement and purpose of mentorship.

? E - Engagement and commitment to the mission and mentorship relationship.

? N - Network building and gaining connections.

? T - Trusting and transparency relationship.

? O - Opportunities to grow and learn together.

? R - Review the progress of the mentorship: Do a Retrospective and Renew if you want more.

So being a MENTOR, means that you have a mission statement and purpose, you commit and engage to that mission together (mentor-mentee). You connect and build your network together and build that trusting transparent relationship together. Through these, you get many opportunities to grow and learn together. Once you have reached your timeframe and goal of your mission and purpose, it is also important to review and reflect. It is good to have a retrospective of how your mentorship went, just like a Sprint Retrospective on an Agile System Development project.

Volunteering to Mentor

To those who follow me here on LinkedIn or Twitter and know me publicly, I openly share about me volunteering to mentor others in different groups (most of them non-profit organizations or friends recommendations) to make a difference, especially for the purpose of inspiring other women to choose a career in the tech and IT industry.

Sometimes, aside my extra community activities of being one of the community leaders of Azure User Group Sweden , writing my first book project - technical book about Microsoft Azure (Learning Microsoft Azure ) on my weekends and publicly speaking about Azure and Microsoft technologies I am passionate sharing about, you will also find me sharing about gender diversity and inclusion as well as mentoring others - I help what I can, tech or non-tech.

I am also a volunteer mentor at Ulap.org , and I'm happy to hear feedback from my Ulap.org mentee, Anna, who shared her thoughts about our mentorship on her recent blog.

My ULAP mentor is Ms. Jonah Andersson, I’m so happy that she is my mentor, she gave me pieces of advice in life, in career, and in studies, that pieces of advice will remain to me because it gives me hope and strength to believe in myself, believe on my dreams and don’t give up to whatever happens. I’m so proud of what she is right now and I want to be like her soon. Every time we have a mentorship I’m always excited because I will learn a lot, and as what I promised to myself that I will do my very best to learn, ate Jonah teaches me different programs like PHP, HTML, C#, and many more and I’m enjoying it. Thanks to ULAP because I met her.?

- My ULAP Journey by Anna Marie Alcantara

Also happy to see feedback from my other mentees Mikaela Eriksson via DataTjej and Beatrix Cendana via BitProject Serverless Camp last year.

I know that I have an inspiring story to share. I believe that my experience and lessons learned as a software engineer in this field might be useful and insightful to someone. I've had and have several mentorships for the past two years. I shared some of them on my social posts. Gratefulness is what I feel when I see my mentees becoming mentors or them achieving their goals as Software Developers and be what they want to be!

Mentoring at Work is Like Collaborative Friendship at Work

When we are at work, we are busy with the job we need to do. It is also important that we have good collaborative relationships with our colleagues. However, it is not so common in many work places to have mentorship program as a standard. I think every workplace should have one. In my current workplace, Forefront Consulting , I am mentoring someone, a colleague and it has been an inspiring and learning journey for us!

Since March 2021 (a year now), I have been in mentorship with one of my great female colleagues So fia Rokonnes who is also a Software Developer. She is part of the Generation 9 group at Forefront. Sofia and I find time to meet 30-45 mins bi-weekly for our mentorship. We learned a lot about each other and collaborated together in different ways. We talk about development in Azure , Microsoft Certifications path, C# programming , and even non-technical stuff like working as an IT consultant, being a woman in tech in the industry, choosing and switching roles, time management, and so much more!

Sofia and I are both part of the J?mst?lldhetsgruppen, which is a group in Division Technology at Forefront. We work together to find ways on how we can make our workplace more equal, diverse, inclusive. Aside from the mentorship Sofia and I are doing together, we also wrote a set of articles (in swedish) below.

• Forefront vill att fler kvinnliga utvecklare ska ta plats inom IT-branschen
• Forefronts medarbetare jobbar f?r j?mst?lldhet i IT-branschen

Finally, I want to end this brief article by inspiring you to never stop sharing knowledge and mentoring others. Your story and your lessons learned might be helpful to someone!

HAPPY WEEKEND! ????