We’re delighted to be featuring a guest blog by PushFar, who will be launching an exciting new mentoring and career progression platform for students, graduates and professionals in the January 2019. Discover the benefits of career mentoring below.
Career mentoring is becoming increasingly popular around the world. More and more professionals, across a wide range of industries, professions and levels of seniority are using mentoring to get ahead in their career and to help others with career progression too. But what is mentoring and what are the benefits of it? Simply put, at Pushfar, we define mentoring as the act of one individual helping another. These mentoring relationships tend to last for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
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1. Mentoring allows us to keep our ambitions in check
When we start out in our career, most of us have ambitions, goals and targets we want to achieve. However, with the pace of work, the pressures regularly put on employees and internal career paths mapped out for us, it can be all too easy to lose sight of our own professional ambitions. Having a mentor can help us to not only keep check of these ambitions but can help us to realise them too.
2. Mentoring can improve our confidence
Being both a mentor and a mentee can help to improve our confidence. For a mentee, being mentored we can grow in self-confidence and know that an experienced mentor can help us to develop our careers. Equally, a mentor can grow in confidence by teaching and aiding their mentee. Both in teaching and being taught, we can learn a lot.
3. We can learn from the mistakes of others
We all learn from mistakes and failures. Often these mistakes and failures are our own but with mentoring we can have the added advantage of learning from the mistakes and failures of our mentor. When mentoring is implemented within an organisation, the learnings from failures are significantly greater and the chance of repeat failure declines significantly.
4. Having a mentor encourages exposure to new ideas
It’s often easy to get stuck in our ways and tackle problems in the same way that we have done previously. Having a mentor can give us exposure to new ideas and ways of thinking. This is particularly true when mentoring is done internally in larger organisations. There are often an unlimited number of ways to tackle problems and in mentoring we open ourselves up to learning alternative approaches.
5. Mentoring gives us an additional support resource
Mentors act as a support for employees who may otherwise feel the only person they can speak with is their manager. While a mentor does not replace a manager (in fact, far from it), they can be a superb additional resource to turn to. In some cases, your mentor might be more experienced to deal with the challenges or goals ahead of you. Being a mentor can also offer you with a less obvious but nonetheless important support resource too. Reverse mentoring is becoming increasingly popular.
So, there we have it – five vital benefits to mentoring. The above benefits are true both of mentors and mentees. If you aren’t yet mentoring others or being mentored yourself, then consider how you might find a mentoring relationship. Lots of organisations are starting to setup mentoring schemes and at PushFar we’re launching a network to help make mentoring more accessible, effective and efficient. As well as mentoring, we are also partnered with Jobheron to look at job and additional career progression opportunities.