Four Tips and Tricks For Mentoring IT

Becoming an IT mentor is an excellent way to put your IT knowledge to work, especially in the age of remote working. With an increasing number of IT positions and a skills gap to match, the value of IT mentors is only ever going up.

That being said, just as IT is a field with many opportunities for skilled professionals to earn money, it’s also one with unique teaching challenges. That’s why today we’ll be giving our best IT mentoring tips and advice to help you meet those challenges head on.

1. Not All IT Mentoring Advice is Made Equal

Teaching a technical skill like IT can be very hard. This is because there’s a lot of information that has to be understood before you can start getting to the practical side of things. Many people learn more effectively once they can start putting their knowledge to work so the fact that there’s a lot of raw information that needs to be essentially memorised can pose a real barrier.

Where you have barriers, you’ll always find people looking to help you overcome them – ourselves included – and while there’s lots of great advice out there for teaching IT, there’s also plenty of bad advice. That’s why it’s always important to take a sceptical mindset to teaching methods and ask yourself whether you think this will work for your pupil.

2. Staying Ahead of The Game

Everyone knows that IT is an industry that’s always pushing forwards. With IT becoming an increasingly diversified space, it’s important to manage the breadth of your skills as well as the depth.

While, as a mentor, you’ll always have your specialist areas, you should try to make some time to keep yourself abreast of developments happening outside of your specialisation. Of course, how you achieve this is entirely up to you and will depend a lot on your personal style of time management as well how much time you can spare/would like to spare for learning.

That being said, if there’s an area that you’re unfamiliar with but are fascinated by, then we’d strongly encourage you to find the time to study it. It might seem like a frivolous use of time if it’s not directly related to your specialist field but the more aware you are of broader developments in the IT space, the easier it will be when your mentee starts asking questions.

3. Be Prepared to Learn New Things

With all that in mind, there will also come times when you have to hit the books yourself. Think of your mentee as, more or less, a beginner. They might have some grounding in the broad concepts or even some specialist experience of their own, but they likely won’t have the same strong foundations on which to learn. This means that it’s far easier for you to dive into a new topic and relay that information back to them than it might be for them to start from scratch.

Keep in mind that any time you devote to improving your existing skills isn’t just going towards this one mentee. The chances are that if one mentee is looking to learn more about a topic then that will be indicative of a trend. The more you learn, the more prepared you are next time someone asks you that same question.

Not All IT Mentoring Tips Will Work For You

This last point is less IT-focused and more a broad principle of teaching, but it’s so important we figured we throw it in here nonetheless. We said earlier that there’s lots of bad IT mentoring advice out there, but now we want to go further and say that even the good advice isn’t always good advice for you.

As a mentor, there is never a one-size-fits all solution. Every mentee is different, just as you are different to every other mentor. Learning and growing is a very personal experience and effective mentoring is all about learning to synchronise your styles. All of this to say that you should only ever take IT mentoring advice as just that – advice. You don’t have to follow it and sometimes you’ll be better off forging your own path.

Take a look at any item on this list and you’ll be able to find exceptions. Perhaps your mentee works better when they do most of their own research? Perhaps you won’t have the time to invest in expanding your skillset and you’ll have to rely on your existing breadth.

What’s important is to find the method that works for you and the unique challenges you will face. After all, there’s no one way to be a mentor but the best way is always your way.

Do you love to teach? Think you’d enjoy sharing your IT knowledge with an eager young mentee? Sign up with Career Navig8r to get started on your mentoring journey today!