Having a mentor gives you access to someone in the career you are wanting to pursue. This provides you with information that will help you develop the skills and competencies needed to flourish in the career you chose. Having a mentor is an aspect of your life that you need to be in charge of. Your mentor is not responsible for giving you tasks and insights on their own. You have to direct the relationship between you and your mentor. You have to drive the flow of information. Knowing what questions to ask at what times could be quite overwhelming as you just start out exploring your career.
A practical and relatively easy way to facilitate the transference of information as well as to have firsthand experience of what your chosen career path is like is to shadow a person at their job. Your ability to observe your mentor in vivo might be constrained by privacy requirements, depending on the career field you are interested in pursuing, but in most cases, you will be able to observe the layout and day to day functioning, requirements and tasks of your mentor.
Experiencing the career, you want to follow firsthand provides you with the opportunity to see how you will react to the demands of the job. This gives you insight into what inherent qualities and capabilities you already have as well as those that you will need to further develop in order to be competent in this position. As you start out on your career journey, you might not be completely aware of all the little intricacies that fulfilling your job requires. Shadowing your mentor will help you notice the finer details that they don’t teach you in school.
At Yong, we provide you with concrete tips on how to make the most of your mentorship experience. We tell you exactly how to approach this process and we provide you with practical tools to ensure your success.
