Mentors are almost like your personal project managers. They help you achieve your potential – both personal and professional. A mentor can encourage you to explore your strengths, work on your weaknesses, and push the boundaries of possibility.
A mentor passes on their know-how to you. They let you in on their experiences and insights from the industry. However, just having a mentor does not suffice on its own. You need to make the most out of your association with a mentor. If not, your investment of time and effort goes in vain.
Here are a few tips on how you can leverage your mentor relationship in order to progress in your career.
Choose the Right Mentor- The Right Match
To successfully utilize a mentor relationship, you need someone who is a trusted authority in your industry. An industry-leading mentor can help you define a career path, chalk out a roadmap, and help you through every milestone. But picking a mentor can be difficult when you are trying to excel at various skills. It?s almost like looking for your personal board of advisors who can guide you to excel in different skills and competencies. Collaborating with industry-acclaimed professionals from diverse industries is definitely not an easy task.
Aim at Overall Depth and Breadth of Development
When you aim to leverage a mentor relationship, you need both breadth and depth of expertise. Your ideal mentor needs to have sufficient cross-industry experience and insights to help you grow in your career. They should also be able to zero-in on your specialization and provide in-depth information and guidance about your key challenges or interests.
To accelerate your career, you need someone with a comprehensive understanding of your industry. This way, your mentor will be able to guide you on all facets of career advancement – personal as well as professional.
Focus on Key Competencies
You need to have focus on what matters the most to your career. Instead of working on a lot of skills, you might want to refine and filter those that are critical to your career advancement.
The right mentor can help you sort these skills and competencies and enable you to gain maximum leverage from a limited period of learning.
Get Feedback and Act on it
Soliciting feedback is not enough. You need to incorporate it into practice. You need a mentor who can hold you accountable for acting on the inputs. The right mentor will see you through an improvement process, track your results, and aim to optimize them with deliberate and continual practice, test, and course-correct cycles.
Only by taking progressive steps in the right direction can you move closer to your goals and advance your career.
Ask the Right Questions
Asking the right questions is the key to improving. You must be comfortable reaching out to your mentor at reasonable hours. And, your mentor should be accessible when you need their specific opinion or insights. With digital mediums, it has become quite easy to keep connected with your mentor.
Soliciting answers to queries along the way is the surest path to driving more knowledge and defining a succeeding career path. To make the most of your mentorship, ask, and learn. In fact, ask specific questions rather than open-ended questions so that you can gather specific feedback to work on.
Use a Tailor-made Mentorship Program
Generic mentorship programs are for everyone, and therefore don?t bring real benefits to anyone. That is not the case when you have a tailor-made program that would work right for you.
Such a program would factor in your learning pace, your future goals, career objectives, and the kind of mentorship you need. Then, it would work to meet those needs by walking you at a pace that is suited for you.
The future of work, as we can imagine, would be all about personalization. You need a mentorship program that customizes itself as per your necessity, connects you with your trusted network of professional mentors, and helps you gather specific feedback.
NumlyEngage™ Enterprise is an Enterprise Mentoring Platform that lets you in contact the right mentors suited to your needs.
By using machine intelligence and artificial intelligence, this patent-pending platform helps you steer the learning experience to your current and future needs. NumlyEngage™ Enterprise comes with a comprehensive database of readymade skills and competencies, feedback questions, coaching tips, and more.
for the platform for free to accelerate your career today.
