Mentoring in IT Companies

When a person comes to a new job, he/she needs some time to adapt to the new responsibilities, company structure, and overall workflow. Mentoring is one of the best practices that make this process quicker and easier. This article shows how mentoring helps newcomers to start working at the new place.

What is Mentoring?

Mentoring is a process of experience transfer from a more experienced person (mentor) to a less experienced person (protege). Mentor shares his/her experience, teaches and trains a protege to guarantee the best knowledge transfer. This process is similar to teaching and training with one significant difference — a mentor is usually partially or fully responsible for the results of their collective work with a protege.

Mentor usually has the same or a bit higher position than a protege. This way, they can easily communicate, work together, and substitute each other. It also guarantees that protege gets familiar with internal workflows and specific work details.

Talking about mentoring in IT, we can split it into two main areas — general mentoring and technical mentoring.

General Mentoring

Every newcomer should be aware of the company structure, internal workflows, how people (or departments) interact each with other and other similar things. It is what general mentoring is about — explain to protege how a company works and help with all the initial issues. It may include acquiring corporate email, security training, and best practices, registration at the internal tools (ERP, CRM, ticketing system, etc.)

General mentoring also includes a communication-related question. Need to introduce a newcomer to all team members, make sure that everything clear for him/her and guarantees that it will stay this way.

It is also recommended to collect feedback (both positive and negative). A mentor can do it every two-three weeks to get a full picture of the progress of a protege in a company. A mentor may also introduce some changes in this process to achieve smoother adaptation.

Most of the companies ask the HR department to do general mentoring. This approach usually works fine, but it may be more convenient for a protege to have a single person (mentor) to discuss all the issues — general and technical.

Technical Mentoring

Although team building and overall structure information are essential, it is not enough. A protege has to learn how to do the job, and a mentor has to explain it. It is called technical mentoring.

Mentor’s responsibility is to explain what kind of jobs should protege do and share the best practices. Mentor also should explain the limitations and show what is prohibited — and tell protege why it is so dangerous to should his/her leg.

Next step is to observe the process, review the results, and point into possible improvements. It is usual for a newcomer to make mistakes, especially in the beginning, but it is not good to do the same mistake several times. The best practice here is to write down the list of common mistakes and ask protege to evaluate results himself/herself before the final review.

Protege may receive only the simplest tasks in the very beginning, but every next job should expand responsibility up to the point when all scopes of work are covered. A mentor should expect issues and problems at pretty much every new step and have a plan to solve them without affecting workflow. Protege should take part in the fixing process to learn from mistakes and do not do them in the future.

Finally, when mentor together with protege finished the job, results should be presented to the whole team, and protege should feel proud of that. A mentor may even intentionally emphasize that to cause this feeling. Protege should learn that a well-done job is vital and much appreciated.

Pros and Cons

Mentoring has lots of advantages, no doubts about it. Newcomer spent less time to adapt to a new environment and carry out his/her duties. It is also essential to involve newcomer into a workflow, explain it in details, and make him/her feel proud of results.

However, mentoring has some drawbacks. Mentor has to schedule a time for mentoring activities — teaching, reviewing, fixing. Also, a mentor has to plan possible variations of a workflow when they work together with a protege. The best practice is not to give more than one protege to a mentor at a time. This way, a mentor will not spend too much time to context switching and will always be on the same page with a protege.

Whether mentoring worth it? The answer is “yes“ in most situations. Time spent on training of a newcomer will be paid off during the several months. In return, the company gets an experienced and loyal employee capable of performing all required duties.