Should you become a mentor?

Mentoring has become more and more popular over the last decade. The main reason being – it’s very useful for lots of people in various disparate roles. An experienced hand to help you overcome the hurdles in your job, field and industry. That can only be a good thing. Right?

Should YOU become a mentor?

Do you want to help people navigate the twists and turns of their career? To help them flourish?
If you’ve answered yes to those two things, you’ve definitely got the right motivation.
Mentoring is using your own lived experience to help people looking to improve their own career prospects.

But, why might people need a mentor:

• Maybe they aren’t getting proper training at work
• Maybe they have a job interview they need to prepare for
• Maybe they want to change career completely

There are plenty of reasons people may need a mentor. Have you got the right experience in your field to help people become better at what they currently do, or could you help give them the right guidance to do a job you’re either doing now, or have done in the past? If so, you might be a good choice as someone’s mentor.

What skills do I need to become a mentor?

There are several skills you need in order to become a good mentor. Some are obvious. Some maybe not so obvious. Some you’ll need to have right from the outset, some others you can learn as you go along.

We’ll list a few of them here – along with an explanation about why the skill is necessary:

Good communicator

It doesn’t matter how relevant your skills are, how much you desire to help or how much you want to be a mentor – if you can’t communicate well with your mentee.
They’re going to be looking to you for different kinds of support and guidance and you need to be able to communicate effectively to get any message across to your mentee.

Positive/Positivity

While you’ll have goals you have agreed upon between you, as the more experienced ‘guide’ in the relationship, it’s important that you remain positive throughout the course of your mentoring relationship. Especially if your mentee is having a particularly challenging time. The onus will be on you to remain positive and help your mentee see a way through the difficult spell.

Strong interpersonal skills

Because trust is crucial between a mentee & mentor, it’s important that the mentor has strong interpersonal skills that will allow them to build a relationship with their mentee and engender a level of trust. (NB – The mentee also needs a level of interpersonal skills. It’s not a one-way street).
If you’re expecting someone to put the forward trajectory of their career in your hands – you’re going to be a lot more successful if they trust you.

Motivated

Rarely, if you are offering mentoring as an external option to someone outside of their company, will you be doing your mentoring during working hours.
There are exceptions of course – if mentoring is ‘what you do’ or perhaps if you’re retired and looking for a career encore then you’ll more likely work ‘office hours’. Otherwise, your mentoring is likely to be done outside of regular working hours. Hence – motivation to perhaps go above & beyond your regular job.
This commitment of course should extend both ways, and both mentor and mentee will need a degree of flexibility to arrange mentoring sessions at mutually beneficial times. 

Willing to learn

While you’ll be imparting all your skills, knowledge and wisdom to your mentee; it’s also a good idea to carry on learning and keeping abreast of all the new initiatives and technologies within your industry. Maybe even more so if you’ve retired. Things change, businesses and industries change.

You’ll be a better mentor if you’re both willing and able to keep up to date with the latest newness in your industry.
Staying abreast of all the developments in your industry also minimises finding yourself in the potentially embarrassing position of your mentee knowing more about your industry than you – when you are setting yourself up as the experienced guide.

Experienced

Last, but by no means least, (we could have started with this), it stands to reason that if you’re going to be guiding someone else’s career – you’ll have had a jolly good go at it yourself, and achieved a modicum of experience and respect within your chosen career. 
Not only will this mean you’ve got more knowledge to share, and possibly more contacts to introduce your mentee to (if you choose to), but it will be much easier to build the level of trust you need with your mentee if you can show how well you’ve performed in the role they are in now, or want to be in.
If you wanted to be an actor (just pretend) would you rather be mentored by Al Pacino…or some guy who was an extra in the background shot of a Marvel film?
It’s Al every time, isn’t it?
When it comes to your mentoring career – be Al.

Why should I mentor with Career Navig8r?

Career Navig8r is perfect for people just beginning their mentoring journey. There is so much you don’t have to think about, like:

Where to find mentees: If you register on CareerNavig8r.com – they’ll find you!
All you need to do is fill in your Navig8r profile, link your LinkedIn account (if you have one) and when your profile goes live, mentees will be able to search by the job role they want mentoring in. If you’ve done that job role, your name will pop up as an option. All you’ve had to do is fill in a few details. Easy.

Assessing mentor/mentee compatibility: There’s no charge for the first ‘getting to know you’ meeting.
Scheduled for 30 minutes, this meeting allows you to see whether you can both work together and make sure what you can offer–and what your mentee is looking for–are compatible. Use this time wisely. It’s important both parties feel this is a mentoring relationship that will be beneficial to both parties.

Booking appointment slots: The Career Navig8r platform has an inbuilt system-wide calendar that lets mentees see your availability. They can only book mentoring sessions with you at the times you’ve listed as being available. You can list as many (or as few) available slots as you want.

Rearranging appointments: Life happens, circumstances change. We understand that completely. If either you or your mentee needs to rearrange a scheduled session, the Career Navig8r internal messaging system allows you to talk to each other within the platform. No worry about missing emails or WhatsApp messages. As a back up – you’ll also receive an email from Career Navig8s alerting you to the request to change the meeting. 

Getting paid: All you need is a Stripe account (as CareerNavig8r.com’s payment partner). You just link your Stripe account to your profile and the system takes care of everything. You set your own rates and you can charge as little, or as much, as you like for your mentoring sessions.
If you don’t have a Stripe account – it’s easy to set up and there is a simple guide [coming soon]

NB – Because money is being moved, we obviously have some guidelines in place around cancelling meetings in a timely manner for both parties. If a mentee cancels too late – they will still be charged and the mentor will still get paid.
Likewise, if a mentor cancels too late, and money has already been charged – it will be refunded to the mentee. Stripe handles all of the transactional sides of the business.
We do have arbitration guidelines which you can find here [coming soon]

As you can see – Career Navig8r provides a one-stop-shop for both mentors and mentees.

However, perhaps the most appealing reason to choose Career Navig8r. Whether you’re looking to start a mentoring career. Or, you’d like the opportunity to earn money through additional mentoring opportunities.

Is the lower barrier of entry we offer.

What we are looking for is mentors who have done a specific job role (successfully) and are looking to mentor people in that job role. There’s no reason you can’t go on and mentor people in other job roles. Indeed you can offer to mentor in more than one job role right at the start. As long as you have performed it previously.
You don’t need to have been a CEO (or any C-suite executive), you don’t need to have been an MD of a multimillion-pound business.
You just need to have performed one job role well – and be willing to share that knowledge, and those skills, with another person. 

Looking to start your mentoring career – do it here: YES – I want to be a mentor