Definition
According to Cambridge dictionary, mentoring is the act or process of helping and giving advice to a younger or less experienced person, especially in a job or at school. It includes a mentor and a mentee.
Real life
Looking back into our early years and first working experiences, we’ll always remember those nice and more experienced colleagues who helped us to get into projects and our daily tasks. Back then you probably weren’t even aware that you are being mentored. We do not have to go that far – in our everyday life we regularly witness mentoring. We can probably recall some recent advice from our more experienced colleague a few days ago that we found useful. Regardless of the fact that behind some person there are years of experience that person can still be mentored.
Benefits of Mentoring
In Pontis Technology we are trying to nurture sharing knowledge and mentoring culture in all our departments and among all colleagues. Sharing knowledge is a never-ending process that brings benefits to both parties involved.
Benefits to the mentor
- Giving back – opportunity to give back to the company & the community by empowering less experienced colleagues
- Better communications skills – while mentoring one must find a way to explain all the details to the mentee which helps into finding ways to communicate more effectively
- Developing leadership skills – Improving abilities to motivate and encourage others. This can help the mentor become a better manager and employee
- Gaining new perspectives – mentoring can also help the more experienced people to learn new skills.
- Career advancing – showing that you have the ability to teach others can show how much importance you bring to the team and help you advance to higher positions
- Personal satisfaction – seeing your mentees succeed is personally fulfilling
- Trusted partner – as a mentor, one gains a very trusted partner in his mentee and finds out how much he can rely on them in the future
Benefits to the Mentee
- Learning new skills – the mentor will share his advice and steps so that the mentee can gain the skills he needs to succeed
- Valuable advice – Mentors have gone through more in their career and can share their successes and fails that will help mentee in future challenges
- Improve communication skills – by working with the mentor, the mentee learns to communicate more effectively with other colleagues at his workplace
- Gaining new perspectives – the mentee can learn new ways of thinking from his mentor
- Increased confidence – having a mentor in a position of seniority in organization makes the mentee more confident
How does mentoring work in the Pontis engineering team?
Our goal is to have a Principal Engineer for every technology that is relevant for our work and build them as owners of that tech stack in the company. Principal Engineers are there to answer questions from less experienced colleagues, help with project activities and resolve technical challenges when they arise. They are the mentors to less experienced colleagues. Principal engineers do not work all their time on client projects which gives them more time to share knowledge efficiently.
For new junior colleagues in the company, we have prepared a set of tasks for different sets of technologies (ex. SQL, .net core, Angular…) tasks start with more simple ones and as the developer makes progress and learns new things, the tasks become more difficult (those are our mentor’s favourites :D). The developers can always reach out to their mentor and ask any questions that they have. The tasks are designed in a way that working on them is straightforward, without the need to hold hands with the mentor while working on them, but still challenging enough to give our mentees some thinking.
Having a standardized set of tasks helps our engineering team – we make sure that all of our junior colleagues are familiar with the basics that are needed for their future tasks and also gives us a benchmark and tool to compare how each individual is performing.
If you are interested in a mentor or a mentee role in Pontis, check out our open positions here.
Here you can see what our mentees have said about our Principal Engineer Sandi.