How Good Mentors Shape Great Careers

The benefits of a mentor can be transformative for career development, often in ways that are not immediately intuitive. Mentors can help you learn the right skills and assemble the right toolset to handle anything your job might throw at you. Furthermore, they can do so through practical, on the job experience, transforming you into an expert in your own right.

It should come as no surprise that, here at Career Navig8r, we think good mentors shape great careers, but today we’d like to talk about how. We’ll be breaking down some of the essential ways in which having a mentor can set you up for incredible success and why more workplaces should invest in proper training and mentorship for their younger staff.

Navigating Business Culture

One aspect of career development that doesn’t get talked about enough is the shift people undergo as they transition from an educational environment to a workplace one.

For many young people, starting their career is more than just picking up a new job. Even for those who’ve worked various minimum wage roles, there’s a big difference between that and getting a job that represents their first step on a career ladder.

For the first time, their work is far more important than its day-to-day impact. Once you’ve started your career, it’s not just about what you do, but about how that work will influence your prospects going forwards.

That means making connections in professional spaces. It means learning how to present yourself in meetings and around coworkers. Perhaps most importantly of all it means learning how to be confident in your ideas while listening to feedback and focusing on development.

It’s a very hard balance to meet and one that doesn’t come naturally to many—if not most—people. Having an experienced person in your corner, someone who knows the landscape and can provide gentle nudges in the right direction, is often just what’s needed to help young employees find their confidence and competence in the workplace.

Legacy Systems & Knowledge

Of course, the benefits of having a mentor aren’t just for the mentor themselves. Companies also stand to gain a lot from helping to guide their new recruits.

When long term employees retire, knowledge of internal structures and systems often goes with them. In response, companies often go through a period of instability during which new methods and approaches have to be worked out. While these times aren’t uniformly bad—they can sometimes force teams to break out of a rut and push things in the right direction—they do represent an unnecessary drop in productivity.

Having a strong culture of mentoring for career development alleviates much of the stress caused by this chaotic period. At the same time, it also presents a stable path for newer employees to question existing working patterns and even inspire changes where changes may be needed.

Put simply, although that period of instability may have its uses, a good system of mentoring can get you just the same results with far less of the hassle.

Do You Need a Mentor?

If you’re sat there wondering ‘do I need a mentor?’, then the chances are you could benefit. If only access to good mentoring wasn’t so dependent on companies being willing to invest in their newer staff?

Well, now it isn’t! One of Career Navig8r’s main goals is to present a path to mentoring that isn’t gate kept by the whims of your bosses. With us, anyone can sign up to learn under the tutorship of people who know their industries inside and out.

By working with a professional mentor in your field you could gain access to someone who can teach you almost anything there is to know about your field. Every one of our mentors has really worked in the role they’re teaching and can show you the path you need to take to get that role.

And the benefits of having a mentor don’t stop there either. Mentors can help you gain access to their network—built up over the course of long careers. Those contacts will make for an invaluable resource both when you’re looking for work and when you’re on the lookout for people to work with.

Returning to our point on business culture, one of the best things you can have in a career is a really strong network. It’s not just about giving you a leg up but about the resources that network can provide to you and your company long term. Your mentor can introduce you to their network and help you to build your own.