Mentoring is one of the powerful learning processes in which a mentor supports a mentee who is normally in his/her early years of career development and/or seeking entrepreneurial knowledge/skills to attain professional goals. In essence, mentoring complements individuals in their nascent stage of the career or a new project to extract the best performance in them in achieving their chosen goals in an effective manner. As such, a mentor having a strong knowledge and wide experience in his/her professional field has a crucial role in helping develop and grow a mentee along a path that he/she wanted to go.
In an organizational setting, mentorship programme primarily focuses on:
- orientation of new staff members to cope with the challenges at the beginning of their career,
- building their self-reliance in the areas of career management, and confidence in executing and managing tasks, and
- acquiring knowledge and skills through available opportunities and improving professional networking.
The process of mentoring involves guiding a mentee with advice, directions and instructions towards reaching their desired goals, can be informal but with a pre-set plan and is often a long-term process, 6+ months. Even some famous and successful personalities had relied on such a mentoring process in achieving their goals. To take few cases, Steve Jobs was mentoring Mark Zuckerberg on entrepreneurial skills and development of Facebook, Warren Buffett routinely providing advice and guidance to Bill Gates on a number of issues that the latter was trying to pursue, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale instilling knowledge and insights on the issues concerning common Indians to Mahatma Gandhi.
Workshop for Mentors:
Mentoring process would be more effective if mentors are prepared in advance and get a unified guideline on what and how to conduct it. Normally, mentors are expected to know:
- the scope and stages of mentoring,
- key mentoring skills, including initiating and developing rapport with the mentee, and
- how to plan and manage a mentoring scheme.
To achieve those objectives, a one-day workshop for mentors is proposed, preferably to be conducted by a professional coach, who shall also be assigned to prepare a basic manual on mentoring, that would guide the mentors throughout different stages of the process, and develop a format for evaluation, one each for mentor and mentee.
Mentors participating in the scheme, besides having the first-hand experience, knowledge and skills in a chosen field, should have a keen interest to helping mentees and have dedication, flexibility and willingness to spare extra time, if needed. Mentors should always be able to communicate openly, encourage and motivate mentees during the mentoring sessions to put them on a right path with ease in reaching out to their desired goals. Mentors interested in volunteering in the mentoring scheme will be identified through IITRAAN “who is who” database and individual contacts.
Mentorship Scheme:
This is going to be the first activity that IITRAAN under its Outreach Programme (OrP) is launching this year, and as such some extra efforts from the Executive Committee (ExCom) members would be required to make it effective and successful. Predictable supports would be needed, in particular, for identification of mentors and conducting the workshop for them, and soliciting potential mentees to apply for the mentorship scheme.
As discussed among the OrP team members, we are targeting some 15 to 25 mentees to be selected through a combination of open applications and candidates proposed by the networking organizations. The applicants are expected to represent from a diverse technical field. For the first batch, it is envisaged to run the scheme for a period of nine months, followed by three months evaluation phase. The execution of the scheme shall be coordinated by the members of OrP team from its inception to the evaluation phase.
Resources Needed:
Core members of OrP team will steer the overall scheme and ensure that required planning, preparations, implementation, monitoring and evaluation are carried out in a timely manner. Planning and preparations also include setting up of a roster of volunteering mentors among the IITRAAN members and identifying a resource person (paid, a professional coach) to conduct a workshop for the mentors and prepare the mentors through the workshop. IITRAAN website, under preparation at the moment, will serve inter alia as a communication platform for disseminating the mentorship scheme to a wider audience and soliciting applications from potential mentees.
Besides human resources, mostly volunteering mentors among IITRAAN members and a resource person to be paid, some funds will be needed to organize the workshop for the mentors to cover rental for venue, food and stationeries. We shall jointly discuss on these with the ExCom and figure out ways to meet those needs, including potential sponsorships and individual contributions.