3 Things you Should do Before Finding a Mentor

Holly Boothroyd — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 13:27:00 +0000

Finding a mentor is often spoken about as being one of the best things you could do for your career. Mentors can help you find your direction, overcome new challenges, provide you with a fresh perspective, and so much more.

But before you run to go find yourself a mentor, pause to reflect on these three areas to ensure the career relationship you initiate is as productive and impactful as possible.

Understand the Different types of Career Relationships

Mentor. Coach. Sponsor – Do you know the difference? People often seek out mentorship, without fully understanding the variety of career development relationships and who drives them. Confirm that a mentorship relationship, vs having a coach or sponsor, is most applicable to your needs.

"A coach talks to you, a mentor talks with you, and a sponsor talks about you"

A mentor, whether its formal, informal, or ad hoc, helps you navigate your career and gives advice about career direction, handling situations, and meeting goals. The mentee, you, drive the relationship and the mentor plays a reactive role in response to your career or interest areas.

A coach is much more proactive than a mentor and is possibly a short-term relationship. They enable you to learn new skills (typically soft skills), overcome challenges, and/or improve your performance. The relationship is driven by both parties. You’ll find that companies will hire coaches for their leadership team.

Finally, a sponsor is senior leader or someone with influence who helps you get high-visibility opportunities, promotions, or new jobs. The sponsor drives the relationship by advocating about you to others in different settings. They champion your work to important people.

Ask yourself "what do you want to learn" and remember to be prepared for each session

As we have established, a mentorship relationship is supposed to be driven by the mentee where the mentor is responding/reacting to the needs of the mentee.

To help your mentor support you in the most effective way, be clear about what it is you want to learn or takeaway from the relationship and how they can help you. Of course, life will throw new opportunities and obstacles your way over time but knowing what you want to initially learn puts you on the right track from the get-go.

As each session goes on, preparedness continues to be important. Be sure to at least have a theme or a couple questions to chat about in each meeting. Or if you have nothing specific to talk about in a session, make it clear to your mentor that you just want to chat and connect – there is still value in building positive relationships.

Being prepared for meetings demonstrates that you respect your mentors time and will help your mentor support you in the most efficient way possible.

Some possible themes that you may want to talk to a mentor about are:

What are different career paths I could explore?
What skills, both hard and soft skills, are valuable in different roles and how can I build them?
What opportunities do you know are available to network with different people in the spaces I am interested in?
How can I position myself for a promotion?
How to I have a productive difficult conversation?

To learn how to see if your values align with your mentor, head to SheCanCode for the full article!

So, You Want to Be an Engineer, but Don’t Know How

Holly Boothroyd — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 18:21:00 +0000

Diving into the tech industry can feel a bit overwhelming at times. The vast expansion of the tech industry in recent years and the historical lack of diversity means not enough people are getting the information and mentorship they need to make strategic choices about getting into tech. Let’s change that by giving you a basic framework to focus your efforts and land you a role you will thrive in!

Working Backwards

The joy of tech is that it impacts basically every industry, in every part of the world. You want to find the intersections between what you love and your work. Finding the intersections helps boost your motivation, increases how quickly you learn, and ultimately leads to finding greater success. Allow yourself to think boldly – anything is possible!  

The first place to start when finding your tech pathway is by looking at what you truly want to do and working backwards!

Ask yourself questions like:

What am I passionate about?
What are my strengths? Consider both technical + professional skills (eg. Communication + collaboration).

What impact do I want to make?
What products or companies align with my goals and/or passions?

With a better idea of what you want to do, it’s now time for a bit of research:  

Take a look at Job Postings:
Look for ones at the companies that speak to your mission or are building the tech that you want to work on. This is the clearest indicator of what skills you should be gaining. However, don’t let job descriptions prevent you from applying to certain roles if you don’t have all the skills – not everything is a must-have to land the job.

Use Online Social Platforms:
Find people on LinkedIn, Twitter, and/or reach out to people in your network who are doing similar things to what you want to do. Look at their journey and focus on the skills they learnt that led them to where they are now. Make note of the things that stand out to you.

And that’s it – a data-driven, personalized process to inform what skills and experiences to gain to reach the life that YOU want. By planning backwards, your moves are more strategic, and you can feel confident that you’re always heading in the right direction.  

Education Paths

With this in mind, you now know what to learn, but the question remains how should you learn it? Again, your choice depends on what works best for you. Tech is a special industry because it does not require you to follow a certain educational path to gain the necessary skills. This means you can choose your path based on how you learn best and your individual life + financial circumstances. Let’s go over some of the common educational paths:

University

Apprenticeships

These are quickly becoming a popular approach and one of the best ways to get the best of all the different paths into tech. You will learn on-the-job (so is ideal for people who don’t enjoy a traditional classroom learning environment), get paid for your work, and, depending on the apprenticeship scheme, earn your degree with a partner university absolutely FREE! Plus, you will likely get a post-apprenticeship job offer. Apprenticeships that include completing your degree are generally as long, or possibly longer than a traditional 4-year degree, but you end up with multiple years’ experience and no debt. I highly recommend looking into apprenticeships if the university path doesn’t appeal to you.

Bootcamps

This is a much shorter, highly focused learning path that will teach you the fundemental skills you need to get a job in tech. Many bootcamps focus on a particular tech stack (eg. web development or data science), so you will not get as much technical breadth as a university degree, but you will complete it in a fraction of the time. Good bootcamps will teach a mix of theoretical and practical content, will require you to create projects to demonstrate your skills and have something to put on your GitHub . They will also provide career resources to help you get a job after completing the course, and have clear metrics on how successfully their students went from doing their bootcamp to having a job in the relevant industry. Bootcamps are fairly pricey – they can easily be several thousand pounds, but there are often scholarships available for those needing financial aid or if you are part of an underrepresented community in tech.

Self-Teaching

Regardless of if you are trying to get into tech or are already in it, you will have to self-teach at some point to stay on top of the latest changes in the industry. This path requires the most amount of self-motivation and drive. You are solely responsible for your learning and how quickly it takes. However, you also have the flexibility to learn whatever you want at a far lower price than through a university or bootcamp. This is generally the hardest path with which to get into an entry level role but is entirely possible and is quickly becoming a common path as tech resources become more widely available and the need for technical people continues to rapidly increase.

The choice is yours! Getting into tech does not require following a single path. You can choose the path that best aligns with you and your circumstances.

Career Planning – HerHelloWorld