A guide on my journey to becoming an engineering mentor.
Mentorship has always been a real passion for me, I have become a mentor for almost a quarter of my life (from highschool and through university). I enjoyed being a peer mentor, mostly because I could relate to many of my mentees' experiences. Also, to be honest, mentorship is hard, but if done right, it is one of the most fulfilling and fruitful experiences for both parties.
In this very short proposal, I provide a process that I will take as an engineering mentor. This process can be applied by mentor to mentees at all levels, however, in my case (as a junior), I will be focusing on interns as mentees. I will also keep this guide up to date, to document my experience and updates process.
Learning to us humans is what we helps us to grow, now the more we will learn the more we grow.
Being available to listen and respond to questions that mentees may have. Overall, being available means showing up for meetings, being there when needed (within reason of course). This helps you become dependable and can lead to more fruitful interactions as time goes. Setup weekly 1-on-1's to make sure they’re learning what they hoped to learn and are enjoying/passoinate about the work that they do.
Often times mentees can have a lot of anxiety about the mentorship or even the work they do. By being friendly and welcoming, you help the mentee become less anxious and to become more engaged. Inviting them out for a work lunch or grabbing coffee at the office can help build that much needed rapport. Also, we won't all have the same backgrounds, so having an open-mind will allow you to learn more about your mentee and be friendly to them.
You will need to draw form your own experiences a lot of times during your engagements. Being honest about your experiences will benefit both of you in that it paints a realistic picture of realities that often times can be overlooked.
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear
Challenge your mentees to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Your job is to help them level up by throwing appropriately challenging tasks at them. A game that is too easy isn’t very fun, and likewise a game that is brutally hard is also no fun.
Start with easy challenges for them, this will help them with their confidence and ease their anxiety. Then you can gradually increase the level of diffuclty and be prepared for them to surprise you - it might be that you deem a challenge too difficult for them and yet they surprise you with how well they do.
Help them through the tech stack, in my case it will be issues around but not limited to;
- Installing Ruby/Rails on their laptop
- Helping them through understanding the tech stack and its ecosystem
- Navigating the tech stack and helping them get ready to start contributing
- Helping them use Git/Github the way we use it.
- Helping them understand the anatomy of a good Pull Request
- Helping them through understanding code reviews and how to receive and respond to feedback.