Student Mentoring - 5 Key Things to Know About It

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Whether you’re a student, recent graduate or an educator working with students, the chances are that you’ll have come across the concept of mentoring. Mentoring is extremely valuable in learning, educating and developing (both personally and professionally). But the fact is that there are still a lot of people out there who aren’t entirely sure of what mentoring is, how it works and how it can benefit students. Fortunately, at PushFar, we’re building a platform to help make mentoring more accessible for everyone! And so, with that, we thought we would put together five key things we think everyone should know about student mentoring.

1. It doesn’t have to take up much time
Mentoring can sound daunting, but rest assured that it doesn’t need to. It actually doesn’t require too much time commitment to make mentoring effective. This is true both of mentors and mentees (those being mentored). The time you put in is entirely up to you. As a mentor and mentee, we recommend you both setting the expectations, but a good starting point is a meeting or call once a month, for an hour or so. But if an hour a month still seems too much of a commitment, there are some mentoring relationships out there that only commit half an hour. The point is that it is entirely up to you and your mentor as to how much time you both wish to commit.

2. It doesn’t require training to be a mentor
Yes, that’s right. Being a mentor doesn’t require a whole host of training or rules. All it requires is a certain level of understanding and insight in an industry, role or company and the willingness to help. Mentoring, unlike coaching, is informal. The fact is that most professionals can be mentors, if they want to be. The most vital rule of mentoring is to set the expectations at the start.

3. Everyone can be mentored
There is not a single individual out there who would not benefit from mentoring. Whether you’re a student, apprentice or CEO of the world’s largest company – you can still be mentored! Mentoring comes in lots of shapes and sizes. Whether the traditional career mentoring or reverse mentoring (see point 4), mentoring is beneficial to everyone. And in most cases, everyone can be a mentor too!

4. Reverse mentoring is powerful
You may have heard about ‘reverse mentoring’, but then again, you might not have done. Reverse mentoring is the concept of a junior employee or individual mentoring someone senior or experienced, within a company or organisation. There are lots of reasons why reverse mentoring might be implemented, such as an additional channel of communication, encouraging openness or to help management-level individuals to understand more about what’s happening on the ground. Whatever the reasons for an organisation implementing reverse mentoring, it’s extremely powerful and becoming more and more popular.

5. Mentoring can be done virtually
While it’s often good to have a face-to-face meeting with your mentor or mentee, it’s not essential. Mentoring can be done virtually, and therefore internationally! Lots of organisations actually assign their employees a mentor from another office, to help global company connectivity, networking and global workforce cultures and engagement. With tools like Zoom and Skype, you can easily interact over a video call with your mentor. Furthermore, our PushFar platform helps to form mentor matches globally.

So, there you have it. Five key things to know about mentoring! If you are looking for mentoring or to mentor someone else, click here to register for PushFar’s mentor matching and management platform, today.