HR Consultant at ASSIST
Read time: 7 minutes
Mentors are gold. No matter where you are now, you surely want to advance in your career. As a beginner, you would like to start learning and applying your knowledge today. As a senior, you want to continue on your career path full of enthusiasm and rewarding results. As someone in the middle, you expect to learn, apply your knowledge, and get results. At any moment in your journey, you advance by interacting with and learning from juniors, peers, managers, team leads, and seniors - in other words, your mentors.
Let's start with A Beginner's Story (Alexandra U.)
"As any mentor, I started my career by being mentored. My mentor's passion and ability to inspire me were the engine that drove me to want to be just as good and helpful as them.
They provided me with everything I needed to understand the project manager role: courses, books, workshops, and, more importantly, assistance during my first few projects. I was never left alone at the start of my career. I received feedback (even if I didn't like it), and I learned from it. They left me to manage a project from start to finish only when they knew I was ready.
When it came to my turn to be a mentor, the most rewarding aspect was to see my mentees getting promoted faster than I was. One of them came to our company with no experience but a great desire and motivation to learn. It was enough to become a leader (an outstanding leader that now mentors others) in less than two years.
It is a win-win situation: they learn from my or other colleagues' experience, and I gain experience from their questions and edge cases with things I hadn't thought of until then, and I learn from their fresh points of view. This pushes me to always want to be a better version of myself."
This is a vision of how mentoring changes lives, careers, choices, minds, and expectations. If your mentor expects nothing but excellence from you, I bet you will work hard not to disappoint. This is the power of a truly dedicated mentor to elicit your inner strength of changing yourself and your mind. This evolution process is usually referred to as learning, and it is the core of our culture.
Learning from the Best
Maybe you have had the chance to be mentored, and perhaps you have not. In any case, our colleagues from ASSIST Academy have compiled some useful tips and advice to support you in the improvement of your career, no matter where you are in your professional life. ASSIST Academy is one of the programs we are most proud of because it's all about education and developing yourself and others. Let's see what working and learning together have taught us.
1. Actively build self-esteem!
All of us, independent of our age and experience, have bouts of self–doubt, challenges, and moments when emotions go up and down. The only difference between us is the capacity to keep struggling and overcome these states. Unless we win this war of doubts, self-doubt can become, with time, debilitating and plunge us into a harrowing delusion about our faults.
We recommend that you actively build self-esteem through seeking feedback about every result and success in your everyday tasks. Having a culture of giving compliments and showing appreciation at work is contagious and builds self-worth. Also, when you receive feedback, don't just focus on the negatives; celebrate the successes too and reflect on how you've grown and improved.
Focus on being the best version of yourself instead of comparing yourself to others; everyone is on their own career journey, and unnecessary comparison to others can damage your self-esteem.
Actively built self–esteem based on accurate results will last your entire life. It won't shield you from hardship but will make you resilient and tenacious in your endeavors. So, go for it!
2. Ask for support if needed!
Everyone needs to improve the skill of asking for support because we all need help to succeed, no matter our level and years of experience. Knowing when to seek support and whom to ask are powerful skills and strengths that need investment to build.
Asking for support doesn't make you weak; on the contrary, in appropriate circumstances, it is a true power that shows the presence of inner resources and the skills to use them properly. We live together, work together, and succeed together. The story of a lonely hero is just fantasy, not real life.
So, a genuine piece of advice is to speak to, listen to, and learn from as many successful people as you have access to, no matter your experience level. There will always be something new to learn, no matter your age!
3. Never stop learning!
Six months may seem like a short amount of time, but it may be significant for your career development. Technology changes very fast and falling behind on your abilities and the developments in your field should not be an option.
Think about a map with small steps to take in the right direction, toward a greater goal, included in another greater goal, and so on. Goals should be stories without endings because that's life! Whenever we stop progressing, we immediately start regressing.
Always have your eye on the next thing to learn, and aim to do at least one thing a day for your progress (to counteract stagnation).
4. Always have a plan for your career!
A progress map could enable you to build a plan for your career because it shows you the necessary steps to arrive at your next milestone. But a plan for your profession should be much more complex: it should include your mightiest goals, your strengths list and allies list, and the do's and don'ts of your life. It shouldn't be a rigid plan but an outline of what you want to achieve and by when. Then, every day do something that moves you closer to achieving your goals.
Get better at something included in that plan, and you'll be happier.
Always have a plan for your career because life is too short to waste your energy being unhappy at work.
5. Speak your mind!
Start to speak your mind and let your mind speak. Too often, talented people are afraid to raise their voices, so they do not share their ideas. Day after day, build your belief in your right to contribute professionally and express your opinion.
Start to believe in yourself, speak up, and other people will follow.
These pieces of advice can benefit anyone regardless of age, career, industry, or stage of career.
Let's take a look at a senior's perspective on the results of mentorship and the importance of empathy. Why do seniors invest their energy and time in relationships with mentees?
A Senior's Story: Mentorship is about Empathy (Ionuț M.)
"I will start by saying that mentoring is about people, not resources. One of the basic ‘skills’ you need to have when mentoring is empathy.
Believe it or not, we mentors have also been in the situation of having 1-2 mentors who guided us and introduced us to the ASSIST family. From my experience as both a mentor and mentee, I have learned that mentoring in our context is not only about the technical process but also about passing on our company culture and of course the most important thing... ’how to make your coffee’
Based on how I defined mentoring above, I will also report its results from my point of view.
Last year, one of the interns I was mentoring expressed his desire to look for other opportunities after graduation. We worked together to figure out the ’story’ of his life and what he wanted to achieve in his career. I listened to his goals and explained to him how he could reach them here.
We made a plan for his professional and personal development and now, we are working together on various projects. In the end, it was a win-win outcome; he gained experience and worked on cool projects and I managed to add value to the department with such a good colleague.
This goes to show how empathy can lead to honest and worthwhile conversations that just might change the course of a mentee’s career".
Mentoring is an asset of our culture because, at ASSIST, we are aware of the power of a professional learning relationship. We have been organizing software development workshops since 2015 and actively bringing mentors face to face with students in various innovative ways, such as software engineering student competitions. Growing through learning, experience, and feedback is the only way to remain competitive and skillful in the software engineering industry. This is the reason we say mentors are gold.
