4 Ways to Provide Value in Your Mentorship Sessions

Are you looking to offer more in your mentorship sessions? Do you want to ensure that your Mentees are getting the best quality mentoring there is?

While the most important part of being a great Mentor is the experience you’ve built up over your years working in a job role, there are several things you can do to enhance your mentorship sessions. In this article, we’ll explore four easy solutions you can put into practice that will really help your Mentees to excel.

1. Understand the Mentee’s Goals and Aspirations

As a Mentor, it can be easy to assume you know best. Often this is the case, but before you can give your Mentee the best possible advice, you have to make sure you understand their goals.

For example, your Mentee may be someone starting out in the same field as you, hoping to one day reach your job role. In that case, it might be natural to assume that your advice should be tailored towards getting them interviews and teaching them how to make the right impression. That being said, your Mentee might not be in any rush. They might be more interested in improving their skills and ensuring that their knowledge is based on solid foundations before they jump into a job role.

By asking your Mentee upfront about their intentions and requirements, you can ensure that you’re always guiding them in the right direction.

2. Provide Guidance Based on Individual Learning Styles

In a mentorship session, you’ll often be pulling on your own experience in order to teach. You’ll have to remember the explanations that worked for you and the lessons you had to learn the hard way.

That being said, while it never hurts to try the familiar approach, you may find that your Mentee’s learning style is different to yours. In the scenario, you should always be willing to experiment with new approaches to teaching.

Furthermore, never be afraid to ask your Mentee how they like to learn. For some, this will always be a discovery process, but others may already be able to clearly articulate the learning approaches that work for them. Either way, you should always be willing to invite feedback on your mentoring and discussion of what is and isn’t working.

3. Offer Constructive Feedback

Speaking of feedback, a good mentorship session should always include some level of feedback. Whether this is a discussion of your Mentee’s recent work, or a more general overview of how they’re progressing towards their goals, feedback is key to development.

Of course, some people do struggle with giving and receiving feedback. For the Mentor, it can be hard to tactfully point out the areas that need improvement while for the Mentee it can be difficult to hear that, despite their hard work, there’s still more learning to be done.

Although your specific approach to feedback should be tailored to the Mentee in question, as a general rule it’s always good to start with the positives. Constructive criticism is always easier to receive when it feels like you’re taking the next step in the journey as opposed to repeating the previous one.

4. Stay Informed and Updated on Industry Trends

As a Mentor you are, first and foremost, a source of information. Most of that information will come from your first-hand experience in the job role but if you’re retired or you’ve been with your company for a while, then you may want to do some research to make sure your advice is a good fit for the industry as it currently is.

If you have a professional network, this is where they’ll come in really handy. By staying in contact with others in your field/job role, you can gain a wider perspective on the industry as a whole.

This is also a good reason to stay connected to your industry on social media and keep an eye on any trending news stories. After all, you never know when the nitty gritty detail could prove important.

Ultimately, being a good mentor is about being a good communicator and always doing your best to provide useful, accurate information. By getting to know your Mentee, their aspirations, their learning style, their strengths and their weaknesses, you’ll be able to provide them with the kind of advice and inspiration that could really push them towards bigger and better things.

Are you looking to become a Mentor? Are you ready to pass your years of experience forward while earning money from the comfort of your own home? By becoming a Mentor with Career Navig8r, you’ll be able to harness your existing skills and start a lucrative and fulfilling online career. Sign up today at CareerNavig8r.com.