Thoughts on Mentoring (Part I)
Ah, yes.. college before Zoom, when you would be openly mocked for wearing slippers to class.
I mean, I still did it… we all did.
I am what those of us in Higher Education call a “First Generation Student,” which is a label I’m proud to wear. In its simplest form, that means that my parents never went to college. In my case that isn’t entirely true, I suppose. My mother took a few classes after getting her GED and then decided “nope.” So, I guess it’s more accurate to say that my parents never graduated from college. My father also got some technical training in the Air Force which did help him in his career - even if working on phototypesetters bear little resemblance to the fighter jet electronics systems he worked on – but did not attend college.
Incidentally, my wife and I were both FirstGen students when we met on our college campus. Perhaps it’s because of this inside perspective that I have enormous respect for first generation students. I know firsthand that these students are generally bucking a trend in their families, often attending college with little to no family support, and have fewer support systems around them as they navigate the difficulties of pursuing their education. I lived those experiences.
This is why when our university decided to offer a program to offer mentorship to a first-generation student, I jumped at the chance. Over the past academic year, I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with a student who in every respect makes my college accomplishments look not just pedestrian, but frankly anemic. It is possible that she has her act together in her college years better than I do now in my forties. Aside from being inspired by her incredible ambition and focus, one of the great things I have gotten out of this time mentoring is that I’ve gotten the opportunity to think intentionally about the act of mentoring itself.
Pictured: Mentoring, probably.
Or alternatively, two people terrible at arm wrestling.
I have not had a long-term mentor to guide my academic or professional growth. While I’ve had multiple folks that I have inconsistently leaned on for some guidance or wisdom and I’ve been involved in a small number of programs that have assigned me a mentor for the duration of the program (and at least one of them has been incredibly insightful), I’ve never had someone in the formal (or informal) long-term position of providing guidance and wisdom that could help me. I have always been jealous of folks when they say they’re spending time with their mentor or they asked their mentor for some advice. I can’t say for certain that my career has suffered as a result of not having someone in this position, but if you pressed me to bet on it I’d probably bet that yes, it has somewhat slowed my growth.
I can think of a few times that I’ve made a mistake that in hindsight could have been avoided if I had some additional wisdom or perspective on the situation. Of course, I suppose that wisdom could either have come from reflecting on my own experience, but there is incredible value in learning from the experience of someone else who has been doing this longer than I have. I have long called the knowledge of how to operate that comes from sources other than personal experience “unearned wisdom.” In my mind, this unearned wisdom is the primary – and perhaps entire – point of mentoring: it’s an opportunity for the mentor to provide the mentee with the benefit of unearned wisdom, thereby preventing mistakes or detours that could stall or derail a career.
It’s easy for me to think that I have missed out, and maybe I have. I was wondering last week if I was in the minority or if others had a similar experience. From an incredibly unscientific poll that I put out into the Twitterverse, it turns out that I appear to be in a relatively common situation. I thought it would be most useful if I asked people which one of four statements most closely resembled their own experience with being mentored. The four options (edited down for a very restrictive character count) amounted to:
I have had no real mentoring.
I have had several temporary or inconsistent mentors throughout my career.
I have had one long-term mentor that has supported and guided me over the long haul.
I have had multiple mentors that have provided me with guidance for much or most of my career.
You can see from the results that the most common response was that people had inconsistent or spotty mentors, which accounted for over half of all responses. Interestingly, exactly zero people said that they had one long-term consistent mentor. (At this point I’ll probably drop the word “consistent” so long as we agree that when I say “mentor,” I’m referring to a long-term stable arrangement.) This leads me to believe that people who have found mentors believe in it enough and have some sort of process that they have a tendency to find more than one. Of course, people who somehow haven’t found or connected with one have a tendency to keep not having one.
I was surprised to see that I fell into the majority; I thought for sure that my spotty support would have been an outlier because if you read the leadership blogs or listen to career podcasts, it seems like everyone has at least one mentor – sometimes many from all different areas of industry that they lean on for guidance and advice. They meet for lunch regularly and conduct mock interviews and project reviews together. I was starting to think I was the only person that never benefitted from that kind of relationship. I’m not sure if I was comforted or somewhat disappointed that it wasn’t the case.
I was comforted in that I wasn’t alone, because before I asked I thought maybe it meant I was broken. You see, in my mentorship fantasy land potential mentors just walk up to you and offer to serve - so being the only person that no one approached and said “You show a lot of promise - I’d like to be your mentor” would have stung (or at least cemented my belief that I have clearly been a significant underachiever). Despite dodging that bullet, I was also disappointed because despite not having a mentor to benefit from myself, I am a big believer than having one can be a game-changer for someone’s career trajectory. With so many people not having that benefit, I think our career field is missing out.
Training is great, but at some point, you can’t learn every aspect of every job role in a classroom. Having someone to guide you can be invaluable.
After all, someone needs to show you which water cooler the cool kids use.
Why? Because it seems impossible for mentorship to be anything other than beneficial to IT. Think about being back to the point where you were starting out your career, or maybe you still are at that point. When you’re new, it’s almost impossible to know what you should be focusing on. I know several people who have asked what they should spend their time learning. The questions almost always come out rapid-fire: Should I spend my time learning Kubernetes? Should I focus on learning to code? Am I going to get in trouble if I can’t subnet in my head? The reality is that having someone who has been down the path before and can show someone the way is very powerful. In fact, this is what has always attracted me to the tech community I’m still proud to be a part of. It’s like crowd-sourced mentoring.
So where does that leave us? Well, most of my followers are in the IT or tech industry. (I attempted to go mainstream and tried valiantly to get a following of people who follow me just for my brand of comedy, but that didn’t work out at all. Apparently, I’m not “funny.”) That means we can assume that most people who completed the poll (and let’s be clear: there weren’t that many, so if it wasn’t anonymous, I could have just asked them) are also in the IT field. So, my conclusion is this: I think we very likely have a deficit of mentoring happening in the IT industry. My conclusion is supported by some conversations I had with a few colleagues over the past few weeks. I asked several people a similar question, and the most common answer I got was “I don’t have a mentor” or some sort of general confusion about what I was asking about.
I think this is a problem. I think mentorship in IT has several substantial benefits. First and foremost, a mentor/mentee relationship in our field can look a lot like a master/apprentice relationship in the trades. Lots of technical skills benefit from the same type of practical instruction and knowledge sharing that electricians, plumbers, and other trades get on the job. Think about it – when you were starting out, didn’t someone in the office show you some basic steps and processes that you still use today? You certainly learned how to find the answer on your own at some point, but I’m guessing that you didn’t intuitively know to do that. I’ll concede that there’s always a chance that you had to come up with an effective way to research problems solo precisely because you didn’t have any support.
If you happen to make a move from hands-on IT practitioner to some other role within the industry - say as a project manager or a position of leadership - you could also benefit from mentorship. I know for sure that especially when I was new, I would have given my left arm (and maybe my right) for someone to show me how to handle some difficult situations as I worked to figure out how a manage a staff on my own. I probably would have fewer costly mistakes with the two resources you can’t afford to waste: trust and time. I wasted both with unsettling frequency in my early management days. I wish someone could have told me there were better ways.
If your mentor ever tells you that this is a good idea, you have picked a bad one. Find a new mentor.
At this point, I hope I’ve made my point that IT has a lot of opportunity for mentorship. I think the industry could significantly benefit from a stronger model of mentorship than we currently have. At a bare minimum, I think we all stand to benefit by making mentorship within IT a more common practice. I’d like to think that part of the solution to a poll where exactly zero (0) people have said they have had a long-term mentor is to normalize the idea of having a mentor and ultimately being one when you get to that point in your career.
There are some people feel like they don’t need a mentor. I actually had one comment in the poll that when asked if they wish they had had one answered a resounding, “no,” and elaborated by saying that they didn’t have any interest in a management career. I think they were effectively saying that having a mentor might only be useful if they were intending on intentionally moving into a less technical role. I’m not sure I believe that for the reasons I mentioned before; mentorship isn’t just about growing leadership skills, but growing all skills.
I originally wrote a post that was quite a bit longer, but back when I started this blog I promised that my posts would be limited to 2000 words at most so I’m turning this into a multi-part article. I’ll be posting parts two and three over the next two weeks. Part II will discuss some thoughts about finding a mentor if you want or need one, and Part III will talk about how you can be open to it if you want one.
In the meantime, conduct your own poll. How many IT pros do you know that have had a mentor – and how many of them would (or would have) wanted one? Maybe more to the point – how about you? Do you feel like you could have benefitted from having a mentoring relationship?
Questions for Reflection:
Do you agree with me that mentorship in IT is behind other industries or career fields?
Have you had a consistent mentor? How do you feel that has impacted your career?
If you haven’t had a mentor, do you think you would have benefitted from having one?
