Mentoring: what to expect

Mentoring is a partnership between an experienced and less experienced individual – a mentor and a mentee. It's a voluntary and reciprocal learning opportunity, lead by the mentee. The mentor shares their personal skills, knowledge and experience with the mentee to enable them to achieve their goals.

Benefits of mentoring 

For mentees

As a mentee you’ll need to be comfortable driving the partnership with your mentor. They’re here to support and guide you, but you’ll need to be clear on your goals and actively working towards them. Becoming a mentee will help you:

• Increase confidence and self-awareness
• Progress your career
• Increase work satisfaction
• Expand your networks
• Work through challenges.

For mentors

Becoming a mentor isn’t just about helping a less experienced engineer. You’ll get loads out of it too that will help you develop personally and professionally. 

• Build your leadership skills
• Re-examine your own practices, attitudes and values
• Increase your confidence
• Learn from the mentee’s experience and knowledge
• Earn CPD hours

Creating a great partnership 

Mentee responsibilities

The mentee is responsible for driving the partnership by taking the lead, initiating conversations and indicating where help is required. This may not be easy at first, so take a look at our module to see how you can create a great mentoring relationship.

The Creating a great mentoring partnership module helps you take the lead and drive your partnership with your mentor. Access and complete this module for free before your first meeting.

View module

A good mentee is an active and considerate participant in the mentoring partnership. They will be open and willing to learn from their mentor and will take the initiative in seeking guidance and advice.

Overall, the role of a Mentee is to identify and work towards achieving their goals and objectives with guidance from their mentor.

As a mentee, one way of ensuring you are getting the most from your mentoring partnership is to show respect, be responsive and take accountability.

Mentee expectations

A mentee might also expect:

• an approachable mentor who is willing to share knowledge and experience 
• introductions to potential connections and networks
• technical guidance and advice when tackling challenging projects
• support and reassurance when tackling professional challenges.

Mentor responsibilities

The mentor is responsible for sharing their knowledge, experience and advice.

A good mentor is honest and encouraging, but also willing to offer constructive criticism. Good mentors will share opinions but will also encourage mentees to form their own ideas.

Many mentees will have concerns about being considered a burden, appearing naïve, lacking in direction, or will not know what kinds of questions to ask.

A good mentor will be approachable and will be able to provide constructive support to ally these concerns while maintaining a professional relationship. 

Mentor expectations

A mentor might also expect:

• a prepared mentee who has thought about their goals and objectives
• a willingness to openly share the challenges they need help with
• accountability for progressing agreed goals and objectives-giving things a go
• timely and responsive communication.

Next step: meeting guide