How Mentoring Increases Funding Opportunities
More and more businesses are encouraging their employees to enlist the support of a mentor. The nature of the scheme varies from one organization to another, but what they all have in common is the capability to create opportunities for your career.
Mentoring aims to equip an individual with an experienced person that can advise them on various aspects of their career. Meeting on a regular basis, the relationship can go on for some time, and individuals are not limited to having just one mentor.
Having amentorcan achieve great results, including increased career opportunities.
Your mentor can help you make new contacts
A mentor is likely to be an established career professional, with a broad circle of contacts. Once you are under the care of a mentor, he or she will be able to introduce you to new contacts and opportunities. This could include networking events, individual meetings or other opportunities for learning, none of which would have been accessible to you prior to joining the mentoring program.
Mentoring broadens your development plan
Your personal development plan is normally managed between you and your line manager, but tends to get focused on role-specific objectives. This is largely because the relationship between you and your boss operates on a single level. With a mentor, there are no expectations of what you should do, so you are able to broaden your thinking into other areas. This could include skills that you would like to acquire to progress into another role. Mentoring helps expand the scope of your development activities.
You can learn a lot from your mentor
Choosing the right mentor is important and you should always aim for a mentor that has career experience that is relevant to you. Once in place, he or she can share experience and learning that is specific to your own career plan. They can become a trusted confidante and a trusted source of wisdom. Mentors often help you see things or think about things in a different way, through the detachment they have from what you do on a daily basis.
Mentoring demonstrates commitment to your career
Mentoring can be highly motivating for individuals, especially as it can affirm their employer’s commitment to their development. It can also help individuals focus on what they want to deliver and can refresh plans that might otherwise have stalled through a lack of focus. The visibility of being scrutinized by a mentor can encourage employees to take development much more seriously and, because they must drive the results themselves, this also ensures that they take more accountability. All these behaviors can further the individual’s career profile.
A mentor can be more honest than anyone else
As the mentoring relationship is entirely voluntary and confidential, a mentor is able to be much more relaxed and honest with an employee. They can offer ‘reality checks’ that a line manager simply couldn’t get away with. They can also offer insight and opinion in certain scenarios where a line manager might be obliged to follow a prescribed path. Good mentoring relationships often develop into friendships as a result of this.
Mentoring is a great career-booster, opening up new opportunities and sharpening skills that might otherwise flounder under a traditional development plan. It is, however, very much owned by the individual, who must ensure that he or she manages the relationship to get the best out of it.
