Mentorship: Why Do You Need it for Your Career Growth?

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Mentorship is one of the most effective paths to career growth and professional development, and this is true across industries. If you're feeling stuck in your career or lack a sense of direction, consider seeking a more experienced person in your field to mentor you. The arrangement will benefit both you and your mentor, and the insight they offer will help bolster your professional life.

What is Mentorship?

Mentorship is a special relationship between two individuals, the mentor and the mentee. The mentor advises the mentee, serves as a role model for them, and supports their professional development; the mentee benefits from the wisdom and guidance of the mentor. Mentorships typically last over the long term, meaning nine months or longer.

How Mentorship Works

A mentor and mentee usually meet each other through their careers, whether they have roles within the same company or work within similar industries. The mentee often reaches out to the mentor first, asking for their assistance in developing their career.

Throughout a mentorship, both parties receive benefits from their involvement in it. While the mentee grows their career through the knowledge and insights given them by the mentor, the mentor is gifted with a sense of satisfaction and an indication of their influential role within the industry.

There are several areas where a mentor may help their mentee:
• Finding a new job
• Setting career goals
• Advancing their position within a company
• Understanding the industry's political landscape
• Gaining new skills

Additionally, the benefits of mentorships often sift through into both parties' personal lives. This is because satisfaction in one's career can lead to satisfaction in one's daily life and vice-versa. Not to mention that many of the skills and advantages gained through mentorship can be applied to one's personal life as well.

The Power of Mentorship in Your Career Development

There are several ways in which mentorship can aid your career growth and make you a more valuable player in your industry, with a whopping 97% of people with a mentor finding them to be an "impactful and valuable" resource.

Learn New Skills

A mentor can help you learn new skills relevant to your current role or industry. Suppose you're working in an entry-level role with a major corporation, but you want to take another step up the corporate ladder to join management. While you may excel in your current position, there are certain management skills you'll need to acquire before advancing your career.

By engaging in a mentorship with someone who is already in a management position, you can learn those skills from them to increase your chances of landing a management position yourself.

Overcome Obstacles

Your mentor can also help you overcome obstacles in your career or personal life. For example, a study has shown that women studying to be in the surgical field benefited from having a mentor help them break into this male-dominated industry. Mentees who had mentors of the same race or ethnicity had even greater feelings of satisfaction.

No matter the career you're pursuing, there will be bumps along the way: education requirements, resume gaps, a hectic family life, unexpected circumstances, and the list goes on. While friends or therapists can help with the emotional windfall of these issues, a mentor can help you take steps to improve your professional situation or work with you to find a new perspective that will help you stay on track toward your goals.

In fact, PushFar found that those who have a mentor are five times more likely to be promoted than those without a mentor.

Gain Perspective

In a similar vein, engaging in a mentorship can help you gain perspective. Even the most open-minded of us need a little help seeing things from all angles. Next time you have a professional setback or a rough day, your mentor can help you step back and view things from angles you perhaps hadn't considered.

Your mentor can also offer you insight into a role you're considering and how you can land your dream job. It's easy to overlook key details when you're working toward a goal or become overwhelmed, and that's where having a compassionate mentor by your side will work wonders.

Improve Communication Skills Any career you pursue will require communication skills, and your ability to communicate will likely need to increase the higher up the career ladder you go. While having a mentor will give you plenty of communication practice in and of itself, your mentor can also teach you how to be a better communicator through lessons or real-world experiences.

Expand Professional Network

Do you know what happens when you gain a mentor? You've also added one more person to your professional network. And that person knows people, who know people. You get the idea!

In today's world, having a solid professional network is key to maintaining or advancing in your career. In addition to indirectly expanding your professional network, your mentor can give you advice and real-life anecdotes on what it means to network and how to build your network to benefit your career.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, mentorship offers many benefits for your career, whether you're just starting out or have been in the game for a while. Knowledge and wisdom are invaluable at any stage of your career, so don't pass up the opportunity to find a mentor.

Author Bio

This article was guest written by Kate Myroniuk. Kate Myroniuk is an award winning online entrepreneur and founder of Audext - an online audio to text converter for fast transcriptions with speaker identification and timestamping. She believes making voice content is an essential part of the work.