Mentoring in IT. Where to start and how to become a successful mentor
Hi all! In this article, I will share our first episode of the second season of the “Open Microphone” column, in which Nikolai Mukhranov, senior systems analyst at Sportmaster Lab, spoke about mentoring in IT.
Kolya is a teacher of courses for system analysts, a mentor and coach for students, conducts technical interviews for system analysts, so she knows first-hand about mentoring!
I am publishing a transcript of the report and the recording of the broadcast itself.
We also selected experts on the topic who shared their expertise and opinions, their comments are below in the text.
And if you also want to share your experience in our section as a speaker or expert – knock on TG!
Transcript of the broadcast
Alexey Smozhenkov, broadcaster: We welcome you to our “Open Microphone” section, where we provide a platform for our colleagues and subscribers to perform. Today we will talk about a fascinating topic that sooner or later becomes relevant for any specialist when he grows to a certain level of expertise in his field. This is to share your knowledge with others and help them develop and solve their problems. We will talk about mentoring in IT, and we will understand it together with Nikolai Mukhranov, a senior systems analyst from SM Lab.
Nikolay Mukhranov, speaker: Hi all! Today we will talk about the following:
how to understand the essence of mentoring,
how to determine a step-by-step plan for starting a career as a mentor,
what strategies and skills are needed to become a successful mentor,
why it is important to motivate participants with self-development and mutual assistance within the professional community.
So, what is mentoring and who is a mentor?
Mentoring is a process in which a more experienced professional, mentor, buddy helps and transfers his knowledge to a less experienced specialist, student, helping him develop his professional and personal qualities.
The difference between mentoring and simple training is the creation of a trusting relationship between the mentor and the mentee (student). Usually, when we study somewhere, we do not always have high quality feedback from the teacher.
For a mentor, this is a chance not only to share his experience, but also to learn from experience; the mentor learns himself during the training of his mentor. This helps you develop your communication skills and support your mentee's development.
What are the main aspects of mentoring?
Mentoring is a process that includes training, motivation, and advice, we achieve a common goal, strive for results, we support our mentor, mentor, and guide. For all this we use tools, we’ll talk more about them a little later.
What qualities should a mentor have?
Empathy and ability to understand. It is very important to “see” who is in front of you. Each person needs to have their own approach that will help reveal your mentee.
Deep knowledge of your field. When we reach a certain ceiling in our career or a certain level of expertise, we can think about passing on this expertise, thereby helping the development of the community.
Ability to teach. I would like to emphasize that this is a separate skill that can be honed and gradually improved.
Communicativee skills.
The ability to inspire. It is important not only to criticize and mentor your mentee, but also to support him so that the mentee does not burn out.
Flexibility and adaptability. The ability to adapt to the mentee, but also to trust your mentee and take on that trust.
What mentoring strategies and techniques exist?
Personal development. Constant feedback from a mentor allows the mentee to recognize their strengths and areas for improvement, promotes self-awareness and personal growth. Constant communication and transfer of knowledge to your mentee helps you both grow.
Targeted mentoring. It is important to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART) goals with your mentee to guide their learning and development process. The mentee and I talk through the goals that he wants to achieve, but before fixing them, we determine at what stage of development our mentee is. This allows you to build high-quality training and identify growth points.
360 degree feedback. It is important to involve the mentee's colleagues, as well as his managers or subordinates. This will allow you to provide a more comprehensive assessment and highlight the points from which you can build on when mentoring your mentee.
Project-based learning. Involve your mentee in real-life projects where they can put their acquired knowledge and skills into practice, which promotes deep learning.
Improving skills. Constructive feedback is aimed at improving the mentee's professional skills and helps in adjusting and improving his technical and interpersonal skills. For an analyst, soft skills, in addition to a technical background, play a very important role.
It is important to consider that all people perceive information differently, and by adapting the presentation of material to each specific mentee, we achieve the greatest effectiveness.
What mentoring tools can you use?
Let me give just a few examples:
Miro boards. Convenient in building a road map, creating a common space with your mentee where you can record goals, results, and makes it easy to track the progress of your mentee’s task.
Online meetings with camera. The eye contact we maintain with our mentees allows us to be more immersed in what you're doing while we're apart. I encourage you to always turn on your camera when communicating with a mentee.
Common space. In addition to Miro boards, you can use Google docs, hubs, file sharing services, telegram channels, this allows both the mentee and the mentor to view information and return to it so that it can be improved.
How to determine a mentor's roadmap?
Step 1. Self-determination and goal setting. Identify your strengths and interests in IT. This will help you choose the direction of mentoring. Here it is also important to consider more experienced mentors to whom you can turn for advice and development. This allows you to look at your skills from the outside and improve them somewhere.
Step 2. Building a network of contacts. Join IT communities, conferences, meetups to establish connections with potential mentees and other mentors and improve your soft skills through communication with a wide audience.
Step 3: Create a personal brand. Be active on social networks, blogs and platforms. This way we can broadcast our activities, get involved in discussions, exchange experiences, and improve information.
Where to start mentoring?
Find a mentee. This can be done through social networks, professional communities or referral programs in your company, open platforms.
Identify mentee needs. Conduct an initial screening of your mentee's resume/profile. Assess your strength and how much you can really help your mentee. Your methods and approach must match the level and needs of your mentee. If you understand that you cannot be useful to your mentee, it is better to say so directly and pass it on to another mentor.
Plan and monitor progress. Develop an individual training plan for your mentee and regularly track progress
Always improve. It is important to collect feedback here. Ask your mentees to evaluate your work. This will help identify areas for improvement.
Reflect and adapt. Review your mentoring experiences to continually improve your skills and techniques.
Expand your influence. Share knowledge, create content, participate in public speaking and training sessions to expand your influence in the IT community. It can also help you find your first mentees.
Mentor other mentors. Share your experience with colleagues who also want to become mentors so that together they can make a meaningful contribution to the development of the IT sector.\
What benefits can a mentor get from mentoring?
When you become a mentor, you not only help others grow professionally, but you also gain valuable experience, new knowledge and the pleasure of working together and achieving success. Feedback from students is highly motivating and allows you to evaluate yourself. This experience will help demonstrate to others that you can take responsibility not only for yourself, but also for other people, your students.
How long does it take to mentor one mentee per month?
Everything here is very individual, depending on the task with which the mentee came. On average, I spend 2-3 hours a day, 3-4 days a week, for several mentees.
It is important to discuss the number of sessions and their duration with the mentee on shore.
What problems might a new mentor encounter?
I personally faced the problem of relationships, since everyone is different. I realized for myself that it is important to build boundaries on the shore, rules that my mentor and I will follow. You can return to them periodically.
What to do if a mentee violates the agreed rules and boundaries?
It is important to discuss any problems that arise with your mentor. You can return to the agreements, indicate that they are not being observed, and if you continue to not comply with them, then it is probably better to part ways in this case.
What personal benefits can you get from mentoring?
For example, thanks to mentoring I can learn new tools and look at my processes from a different angle. So, for example, I started using PlantUML, although previously I used it more instead of BPMN. I was familiar with this tool before, but it was thanks to the mentee that I took the plunge again and understood how it can be used in my work.
What inspires you to mentor?
For me personally, this allows me to reveal my hard and soft skills. Of course, feedback from students is very inspiring when, for example, he reports that he received the desired offer. You develop your mentor and at the same time improve yourself.
Expert comments
Artyom Poluyan
Head of systems analysts at SM Lab. Leader of mentoring training. Became a mentor 6 years ago, for the last two years he has been a mentor for analysts in his teams.
“In his report, Nikolay, based on his experience, focused on mentoring people with whom, as a rule, you do not have to work together on work tasks. My experience is mostly related to corporate onboarding mentoring and further mentoring of analysts in the company. Applicable the approaches in these cases are slightly different, so Nikolai’s point of view was interesting to me.
As Nikolay rightly noted, the most important aspect in any mentoring is the existence of a trusting relationship with the mentee. However, in my opinion, the report did not cover the topic of building and maintaining these trusting relationships in sufficient depth. From my own experience, I will say that it is especially difficult to build them in corporate mentoring, when the mentor is not just a friend and assistant, but makes a decision about the success of completing the probationary period.
I liked that Nikolay emphasized the importance of being a mentor in professional communities for continuous development. This is right to the point. When training and mentoring, it is very important to be in the trend of modern practices.
I think it’s valuable that Nikolay touched on the topic of differentiating approaches to learning depending on the mentor’s characteristics in perceiving information. I recommend developing this topic and trying to look at the person’s psychotype as a whole. One such typology is the DISC model. Studying this topic at one time helped me broaden my horizons in terms of the diversity of people’s thinking, although approaches should be applied with caution without labeling.
In conclusion, I want to say that Nikolai is on the right path! I wish him to further develop his mentoring skills, gain experience himself and inspire his mentors to new achievements!”
Yakov Potapov
Independent expert in the field of personnel training
“The concept of mentoring is very broad, I notice that there are different interpretations. From the fact that it is the mutual development of two people, as in your case, to the fact that mentoring is a type of mentoring where the responsibility lies not only with the mentor, but to a greater extent on mentee I think it’s fair to say: each situation is individual and depends on the agreements that two people come to.
It is very difficult to find and contact a mentor. Since this is an employee with his own tasks and problems, he is not always ready to invest time in development. It is also a sad situation when a mentor is forced to be a mentor; this process should always be voluntary, which, unfortunately, is not always possible to achieve.
I would recommend looking at mentoring from different angles. Delve into the topic of the report between the mentor and the mentee, methods of motivating both and creating trusting, mutually beneficial relationships between them. Also, the question is always interesting: how to make someone who doesn’t want to, but has important expertise, become a mentor?”
Ekaterina Nikulshina
Head of analytical support for organizational development projects at SM Lab, experience in mentoring and mentoring with 10+ mentees in different companies, leads and teaches in educational projects within the company in the direction of business analysis and process management.
“I would compare mentoring to a kind of springboard that allows you to get from point A to point B much faster and more exciting than it would be possible using many other ways of acquiring new knowledge. And the main thing here is a clearly and correctly formulated goal. And, of course, the more subjective component is important – this is a certain match that must take place between the mentor and the mentee so that the result of their joint work looks like the formula 1+1=11.
The speaker very succinctly revealed in his report the critical qualities of a mentor, aspects of mentoring and effective strategies, as well as the mutual benefits of this process. In my opinion, the consumers of benefit here include the companies themselves, whose representatives – on the one hand – have matured to the point of being ready to share their experience with other colleagues in their field, and on the other – are so involved in their activities that they are ready to allocate additional resources for more deep dive into your current (or new) professional field.
This is a wonderful experience in sharing knowledge and its subsequent transformation and development.
I would add that the key difference and advantage of mentoring over other training formats is the targeted approach. The mentor packages his knowledge at the request of the mentee, the mentee receives a squeeze of experience and tools that specifically help him on his current part of the path.
I would like to add that mentoring is a very labor-intensive and resource-intensive activity. And in order to figure out whether I really can and want to go into this, or to support myself as a practicing mentor on the path to increasing success, it is important to find a zone of inspiration and my profit in this process. As in the case of a mentee, I need to understand exactly what goals I set for myself and what result will inspire me to continue my educational activities.”
Khakimova Ilmira Kamilevna
Junior category manager at Sportmaster, completed training in the Mentoring course, successfully carried out adaptation for two newcomers to the company and is not going to stop there
“The information presented in the speech is useful and applicable in practice. I am not a mentor in IT, I am rather a mentor for newcomers coming to the department. But in my practice the described techniques are also applicable and effective, such as: setting SMART goals , project- and task-based learning, feedback Drawing up a roadmap and evaluating intermediate results are also important points for successful learning.
It seemed to me that the topic of motivation for a mentor to share his experience was not sufficiently covered. The emphasis was on emotional reinforcement following feedback. In my opinion, it is also important that mentoring allows you to systematize your knowledge. The mentor's competence is transformed from the category of unconscious competence into conscious competence. When a mentor not only knows the information or function himself, but can also systematically and intelligibly transfer knowledge to others. With the desire for constant self-improvement and development, the mentor has an important mission that gives meaning to life and charges with positivity, especially with positive feedback.
Thanks for the column! It was useful!”
Below is a recording of the broadcast itself:
Thank you for your attention!
