The importance of having a mentor cannot be understated, especially for those who are just starting out in their careers.
I’ve been in the shoes of both a mentee and mentor. I’ve served as a mentor throughout my career – building on the initial mentoring experience I gained during my university years. I’ve worked with junior employees, interns, and other mentees working in analytics roles within the insurance industry, both at my firm and through initiatives with external organisations such as Code First Girls.
My mentorship journey at Ki has been incredibly rewarding. The benefits I’ve seen from mentoring employees have been tremendous. From personal experience, being able to watch mentees grow in confidence over time is a real privilege, having equipped them with the technical and soft skills they need to achieve their goals and succeed in the workplace.
Having a mentor can truly help mentees to reflect on their career aspirations, put together a concrete plan of action for progression, achieve their goals and thrive in their chosen fields. In the long-term, mentors can instil confidence and empower mentees to proactively take charge of their careers, and hold them to account regarding goal progression, whilst recognising their achievements. They can be a real pillar of support when sharing guidance.
Mentors and mentees alike can strongly benefit from a mentoring relationship. There’s a real advantage to hearing new ideas and suggestions from someone who has just started their career. Experienced employees can often instinctively write off proposed solutions because it’s something they’re used to, but having junior colleagues offer new ideas and solutions can help them consider more options. From a mentor’s point of view, being able to discuss a range of topics allows you to gain different perspectives on how things are done in your job, which can be very beneficial.
Anyone who is looking to act as a mentor should be able to guide a mentee based on their interests, so that they can pursue a path that’s closely aligned to their career goals. Here are my key tips for being a great mentor.
Enable mentees to be self-starters
New employees who are entering the insurance and tech sectors often find their first few weeks quite daunting. Mentors can be pivotal here as sources of guidance, especially when it comes to explaining how the insurance industry works, what business functions do, and how this all ties in with our work as an algorithmic operator within the Lloyds of London market.
You don’t want to spoon-feed your mentees and drive their careers for them, you are not a second line manager. You need to give mentees practical tips they can apply in real-time, which is important in a fast-moving business environment.
Equipping mentees with soft skills needed to professionally grow in the long-term e.g. networking skills needed while seeking guidance on their careers, as well as technical specialist knowledge for application in daily work, is vital. For example as a data analyst, I can give advice on data engineering, but I will always prompt my mentee to speak directly to a data engineer who is an expert in that field. It’s important for the mentor to know who can give appropriate advice at a company, and can direct their mentees to.
Sharing advice throughout a commercial lens will lay a strong foundation for mentees, enabling them to understand key technical terms and achieve milestones in the workplace. Over time, mentees can also have more nuanced conversations with senior colleagues on key industry themes, as well as opportunities and challenges, and try to present solutions to any ongoing issues. This will enable mentees to feel more confident when interacting with colleagues across difference divisions, as well as external stakeholders.
Tailor your advice, don’t silo your mentees
Sometimes people may be tempted to give generic advice or silo a mentee into following a career path that completely deviates from their personal goals. Whilst it’s important to keep business objectives in mind, you need to find middle ground with what a mentee wants to do. Don’t ignore their aspirations if they don’t align with commercial goals or targets: you don’t want a mentee to feel like they lack agency and are having their career decided for them.
Be present for your mentee
It’s important that mentors regularly meet with mentees and come away from sessions with a plan of action with tangible goals for the mentee to work on, with target deadlines. From my personal experience, this often helps mentees grow into their roles and kick-start their careers. It’s truly inspiring to see mentees develop confidence in a short space of time, speak to colleagues across the business and contribute to essential team processes. One example I’ve seen is through the presentations that interns often deliver when they near the end of their tenures with us: you can’t begin to describe the pride you feel.
Mentoring is a powerful tool to empower mentees and mentors alike. If mentees are learning new skills for the first time like coding, they really appreciate having one-to-one guidance while starting out. Their development can be slow without adequate guidance otherwise.
Mentors ultimately want mentees to feel that they are driving true value in the workplace and are strong assets to their teams, and encourage them to pursue a tech career in the long run.
