The Importance of A Mentoring Network for Career Growth

Sometimes, furthering your career can feel like a lonely endeavour, putting in long hours to build the skills you’ll need to climb another rung on that ladder. Here at Career Navig8r, we passionately believe that it doesn’t have to be this way and that’s why we’re always eager to encourage people to build a strong and healthy mentoring network.

But what is a mentoring network? How does it differ from a regular professional network? And how can you start to build your own?

Mentoring Networks

Let’s start by addressing that first question: what exactly is a mentoring network.

A mentoring network is a group of people with a shared goal – career development. Some will be further ahead than others, and some may share different aspirations, but everyone in a mentoring network is there both to develop their own skills and to help those around them.

That’s not to say a mentoring network has a rigid or defined structure – quite the opposite in fact. A mentoring network can take many forms but the key idea is that everyone is brought together by a mutual goal of growth and career progression.

Boost Professional Development

So how can a mentoring network help to boost professional development?

There are two main ways in which your career development can seriously benefit from a mentoring network. The first is simply the exchange of information. Working closely with others – particularly those more experienced in your field – can help you to find better approaches and identify where you really need to be putting the work in.

The other way in which a network can help is through the sheer enthusiasm that it generates. Put simply, being around and working with other people who are equally passionate about the subject in question can be extremely motivating, especially when those people are invested in helping you learn and grow. Furthermore, getting to share your new knowledge with others in your network can be equally exciting as it’s a sign of just how much you’ve learned so far.

Gain Industry Knowledge

Of course, the primary purpose of a mentoring network is to connect people from outside of an industry to people inside that industry. Meanwhile it can also connect people within that industry across disciplines and job roles. This is extremely valuable because it gives everybody a wider lens through which to understand their career.

Developing in your career is often a balancing act between perfecting the knowledge and skills that are specific to your role, and developing a pool of knowledge and skills that are more broadly connected to the field you work in. With a mentoring network, you won’t have to work as hard to seek out that broader pool of knowledge as discussing your work with others in your network will give you a much wider perspective and teach you a great deal simply through group osmosis.

Learn from Diverse Perspectives

While, as we’ve said, there’s no one system for what a mentoring network can and should look like, here at Career Navig8r, we’d encourage you to work with as broad and diverse a team of people as you can – both in a professional and a personal sense.

Diverse perspectives are crucial for growth, bringing you new methods and new approaches. By combining these approaches with your existing ones, you can have the best of all worlds and develop a stronger mindset.

Collaborate with Experienced Professionals

A mentoring network can also provide unique opportunities for collaboration. Within a network, more experienced professionals have the chance to work with less experienced individuals, giving those less experienced members the chance to prove themselves and learn on the job while the more experienced members have access to eager workers who are willing to bring a fresh perspective to their projects.

That’s not to say these kinds of opportunities never happen outside of a mentoring space, but mentoring networks are great for fostering them because they build a level of trust you might not otherwise see.

How To Find Your Mentoring Network

While mentoring networks can happen organically, they don’t always. That being said, there are also ways to go about finding or forming your own mentoring network and it’s easier than you think.

By signing up to Career Navig8r, you can become either a Mentee or a Mentor today. In fact, why not do both?

By becoming a Mentor, you can earn money while teaching what you already know. At the same time, you can find a Mentor of your own to help you go further. All the while, you’ll be able to meet new people and share in their networks, ultimately building a large mentoring network of like-minded people, working together for the good of everyone.