Your professional career begins as soon as you’ve chosen a major. From that very early age, you’ll need a mentor to guide you, show you what’s best, and boost your confidence when needed. That is how a mentor can enhance your career in various stages of your life.
A mentoring relationship connects a senior professional leader with someone newer in the arena. They work together to enhance their personal and professional development. A mentor is an experienced colleague, so his advice at the beginning of your career is invaluable for your success in the workplace.
As is the norm, a mentor’s job is to share his experiences with you so that you can gain new perspectives in your workplaces. Aside from the numerous benefits of being a mentee, the following are a few we think you should consider first:
1. Gain Valuable Advice
Mentors are full of valuable insights. They are the guides you need in any career related situations. They know the nooks and crannies of what you do. They’ve experienced the same hurdles that you’ll face and in such cases, their shortcuts can take you a long way while their advice can help you in deciding the best course of action in a difficult situation.
2. Develop Your Knowledge
Another great job of mentors is that they know the exact areas of knowledge required to excel in your career. They can build up great interpersonal skills that can help both of you to learn new stuff together and work accordingly. Their expertise can guide you towards learning the sets of guidelines you need in your career.
3. Improve Your Communication Skills
The key to a successful career is communication. The better your communication skills, the better your chances are to excel. Your mentor will instill the ideas on how to communicate in which situations, depending on your industry, designation and overall workplace ambience. Their tips and tricks come from the insurmountable amount of skills gained from mentoring programs, via which they can use all the varying kinds of situations previously faced by their mentees, prior to you. You can learn from a mentor how to communicate more effectively and with more gustow, which will help you be a boss at interactions of all sorts.
4. Build Your Network
In your workplace, you need to have strong, supportive connections for better productivity; as the saying goes, “It’s all about who you know”. After working in the same arena, you’ll eventually see that everyone knows everyone (to a certain extent). In such situations, your mentor can come to your rescue, bringing access to a whole new bunch of people that you may not know but can significantly help you in your journey. Thus, strong networks are born. If there’s anything that you hope to gain from a mentoring program that would be hardest to do by yourself, it’s this.
5. Advance In Your Career
While building your career the most challenging thing for you can be staying focused. There may come situations when you’ll lose focus or feel the work has become mundane. Here, a mentor can enhance your career by keeping you motivated through sharing achievable goals, logical steps ahead and tactics to enhance the capacity of your workload – a mentor can bring you back on track!
6. Discuss Difficult Decisions
Your decisions will make or break your career. As your mentor has an upper hand in the job field, he/she has the best-lived experience for you. As an outsider, he/she has a unique outlook on the entire phenomenon of workplace decision making. While working in a place you may have to make decisions that you cannot share with others at your company. Your mentor can help you take these difficult decisions with a grain of salt.
7. Acknowledge Your Shortcomings
While building your career you need to know your shortcomings just as well as your strengths – much like a personal SWOT analysis. A mentor can point out those shortcomings that you can’t pinpoint by yourself. You can talk about them freely and with much more ease with your mentor. Don’t worry – your mentor is bound to secrecy and will only do or say what is best for you and you only. It’s like having a best friend who is truly trustworthy and 100% loyal.
8. Workplace Bullies & How To Deal With Them
In the workplace, you’ll meet various sorts of people from different walks of life. You can encounter a tough boss or a workplace bully who doesn’t seem to like you. Any wrong move in such a case can cost you heavy career damage. Your mentor knows the best course of action in these cases. He/She may have faced a similar situation or knows someone who has. Tackling such tricky situations is one of the many skills gained from mentoring programs – invaluable and so rewarding, we assure you.
9. Access To Opportunities
A mentor generally is on a higher rank in your shared working sphere. As a result, he/she has access to opportunities that you lack as a newbie. You can learn from a mentor on how to achieve those opportunities, making your work a whole lot easier. For example, he/she can manage you into industry events where you can meet influential people in your field, propel you into stronger deals at the workplace, help you exercise your mind using various learning tools or even finding you the sweet spot towards getting that lucrative promotion!
10. Salary Negotiations
After working for a long period with a company you may want to get a raise in your salary – or at least we hope you’re that ambitious. It has to be relevant to your work for the office and to what extent they find you to be an invaluable resource. Still, there has to be an appropriate approach to your boss. Your mentor will make you aware of it, give you thorough examples of dos and don’ts, and assist you in creating the strongest justification for why you deserve what you’re asking for.
11. Accepting Job Offers
To build a successful career, sometimes you may have to go for the most adequate job you get in hand. The time may come when you get many job offers and have to choose the best one from them. In situations where you are struggling to find the most value-added offer, your mentor can come in and squash all your worries. This accurate advice you can hope to get from a mentoring program, and it will always be worth it.
12. Confidence Boosters
In any job field, confidence is the basic demand. From going for the interview to presenting in front of a big client, confidence is what you need to excel. When you have practice sessions with your mentor, he will prepare/mould you for that extra pinch of confidence. Boosting your confidence by the help of a mentor is not just a great takeaway for your career goals, they help shape the rest of your existence.
13. Develop Stronger Leadership & Interpersonal Skills
Making transitions from a school kid or fresh graduate to a future leading professional in your field takes proper leadership skills. When you are under a mentor, you get first-hand lessons on leadership skills, such as decisiveness, team building, problem-solving, integrity, dependability and most important of all, the ability to be a mentor yourself. These interpersonal skills will make you unique in the crowd of workers while propelling you closer to that goal of being an industry leader.
You can do your work to get a successful career, but without the help of a mentor, you’ll always be one step behind the rest. A mentor is your ladder to success in your career and his/her insights are how your career enhancements can take place.
