Why Mentoring is Key for Your IT Career
Mentoring others is more than just a feel-good way to give back. It also happens to be good for your IT career.
But the first thing to understand is that mentoring and managing are not the same thing.
“Mentoring means something completely different than managing,” says David Dremann Jr., director of information technology and custom IT services at IT firm BLM Technologies. “A mentor focuses individual interest and attention on each team member to identify their strengths, areas of weakness and goals. In an ideal scenario, the mentor guides the employee to learn, grow and strengthen their areas of weakness.”
This is related to managing, but it goes deeper and is more about the person and less about a specific outcome.
Mentoring also is something that any more experienced worker can do with a more junior one. So you don’t need to be in management to mentor. That makes it something anyone can conceivable do.
With that in mind, here are six ways that mentoring not only helps the person you’re mentoring — but also yourself.
1. Builds People Skills
IT isn’t always optimizing for social interaction. That might even be the point, depending on your goals in life. But people skills are important for job advancement, in addition to being a vital skill in general. Mentoring gets you engaging deeply with someone else on the human level, which can be a growth experience if you have been optimizing for other skills such as technical excellence.
“Even in a world where we have gone digital in our interpersonal conversations, it’s key to remember the importance of human relationships,” notes Prasad Ramakrishnan, chief information officer at software maker Freshworks. “Mentors can help IT engineers to understand and practice good people skills.”
2. Improves Your Technical Skillset
Not to say that mentoring doesn’t help with technical excellence too. Mentoring often is a two-way street where you help someone and learn something from them along the way.
“It can become a mutually beneficial relationship where everyone learns and grows together,” says Steve ZoBell, chief product and technology officer for software maker Workfront. “Many times, the mentor also learns new skills from the mentee.”
For obvious reasons, this cross-pollination of skills during the mentoring process can be useful for the next step in your career. Learning new skills is good.
3. Improves Your Reputation
When you mentor a coworker, you help someone. You’re giving, and you’re also signaling that you have something to give.
Others see this act of service, and it boosts your status as an expert or senior-level IT employee — even if that is not exactly reflected in your job title.
When you do look for the next jump in your IT career, though, that status as a mentor to others can pay dividends. By mentoring, you’re showing senior management that you have the skills, are able to work well with others, and can nurture those around you. You’re quietly auditioning for parts of higher management and greater responsibility when you mentor. That gives you a stronger chance of getting that next promotion.
4. Makes You a Leader
Along those lines, being a mentor builds a lot of the skills and qualities that are required for organizational leadership. To be a mentor, you need to be aware of others’ strengths and weaknesses, be able to drive them to unlock their potential and understand their individual needs. You also must have good communication skills to be a mentor, another essential skill for IT leadership.
You might not have all of these qualities down pat when you begin mentoring, but the process of mentoring builds these skills.
5. Sets the Table for Help When You Need It
Finally, the act of mentoring a coworker often opens the door for help with you need it later along your career journey.
First, the person you help will want to help you back. This is human nature. They might not have anything to offer right away, but people rarely forget when they’ve been helped. Especially when they’ve been helped on an ongoing basis as happens in a mentoring relationship. By mentoring, you’re planting goodwill that often will come back later when you least expect it. You’re investing for the future, if you want to ignore the altruistic aspects of mentoring and focus just on the personal benefits.
You’re more likely to get help from others when you mentor someone too. Again, this goes back to that reputation thing. You’ve signaled that you help people, and that often leads to others stepping up when you later need help.
Through mentoring someone, you also learn what a mentoring relationship looks like, and it can help you spot the people who you might want to connect with when you need a mentor.
All of this is a rather self-serving look at mentoring, of course. The best reason to mentor is helping others and giving back. But if that feels like a lot of work for little gain, it isn’t. Mentoring serves you at least as well as those you help.
