Money, knowledge, self-esteem: why should an IT specialist become a mentor

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A recent study by MentorcliQ found that all Fortune 50 companies in the US use mentoring programs. Mentoring is also practiced by 84% of Fortune 500 companies. During the Covid-19 downturn, companies with internship programs performed better than those without such an approach. But mentoring is not only beneficial for companies, it’s also beneficial for mentors. In this article, we’ll explain how this benefit works.

According to another study, employees are significantly less likely to consider quitting if they have a mentor. This is against the backdrop of the fact that American companies alone lose about a trillion dollars annually due to employee turnover: the cost of replacing an employee can reach twice their salary. And 94% of employees work longer if they are offered more opportunities for training and career growth. Mentoring is one of the key development tools for businesses.

Who is a mentor and what is his task?​

Mentoring is a process in which an experienced mentor informally guides a less qualified individual to help him or her develop professional skills.

The main task of a mentor is not to highlight ready-made working formulas, but to help understand the theory and direct the thoughts of a newcomer in the right direction. A mentor does not just share knowledge, he also provides moral support and helps in solving complex problems. When a mentee begins to doubt his work, wants to quit everything, a conversation with a mentor helps to find motivation again and look at his problems from a different angle.

A successful mentor is an employee who has accumulated extensive professional experience, a good reputation, and developed skills for working with a team. We wrote about what this means.

Steve Jobs mentored Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett mentored Bill Gates, Billy Salomon mentored Michael Bloomberg. Mentoring is also well-established at the world’s leading universities. Mentoring is central to the Oxford curriculum. It is based on weekly meetings between two or three students and their mentor, who is an expert on a particular topic. The meetings last about an hour. During this time, students discuss projects with their mentor, receive recommendations, and assignments that must be completed before the next meeting. The meetings are meant to be a discussion, so the student must be prepared to present and defend their opinion, accept constructive criticism, and listen to other participants.

This format allows mentors to closely monitor their students’ progress and support them when needed. Oxford believes that mentoring develops the ability to think independently, both in students and in those who teach them.

Mentors regularly have to deal with new solutions. So, a few years ago, we switched to Figma. A customer came to us with mockups in it, we used other tools. I started studying the capabilities of the service, began to work with literally each team member separately. I showed and explained everything in the "watch-repeat" mode and recorded these intensives. When we had already studied the tool enough, it stayed with us.
Egor Ivanov, Team Lead design at Intelsy

How mentoring at work is formalized and paid for​

Mentoring is not mentioned in the labor code. But they pay for additional work. There are two options for official registration:

• Mentoring is indicated in the employee's work instructions as one of the duties. In this case, there is no additional payment. It is assumed that the salary of such an employee is initially higher than that of colleagues without additional workload.
• The employee's work instruction does not provide for training other employees. Here, the article on internal part-time work or on combining comes to the rescue. An additional agreement is drawn up to the employment contract, which specifies the type of work, the period of its performance, and the amount of additional payment. Then the HR department issues an order that appoints the employee to the role of mentor. In most cases, the organization independently sets the amount of the allowance. The additional payment depends on the complexity and volume of work performed. This can be either a fixed amount (for example, 10,000 rubles per month) or a percentage of the salary.

In our company, a mentor receives a monetary reward of 15,000 rubles. He receives half of this amount after the newcomer has passed the probationary period. The rest - after another three months. This way, the employer is convinced that the instructor worked for the result, and not for the sake of a bonus. We also have a practice when a mentor becomes a team leader, since an experienced teacher usually has well-developed management competencies.
Oleg Bidzan, Technical Director of Simtech Development

According to statistics, mentors earn more than their colleagues who do not practice mentoring. Thus, the average annual salary of a software engineer in the US is $81.5 thousand. But if a software engineer is involved in mentoring, then his salary increases by $38 thousand and amounts to $119.5 thousand.

In our company, working hours are paid separately. Usually, 2-3 hours a week are allocated for mentoring, which is enough to work with one or two interns. This results in a 5-10% increase in salary. This is an optimal workload that allows you to effectively distribute time between the main project and your mentees. If the management of the department sees that the specialist shows initiative, takes on new roles, helps newcomers, their basic salary level is also reviewed.
I feel in demand and confident in my expertise. To work with mentees, you need to delve deeply into the topic, look at processes from a different angle. All this develops flexible skills, because you need to find an approach to each mentee. Mentoring also allows you to spy on interesting things. Once, my intern told me how schemes and targets work with different servers and CI/CD in his project. I have since applied this knowledge many times.
Marina Puzyreva, Head of Mobile SimbirSoft Department in St. Petersburg, Mentor

Computer company Sun Microsystems compared the career progression of nearly a thousand employees over a five-year period and found that mentoring had a significant impact on the careers of both mentors and mentees: mentors were six times more likely to advance to a higher position.

We encourage mentoring by increasing the salary by 10% at the start, as well as updating the working equipment. This is logical, because a mentor can not only program and test, but can also teach this, his functions are broader. He is able to independently present solutions to the management, he can be trusted. Through mentoring, it is really possible to quickly become a senior specialist.
Konstantin Trofimchuk, Director of Development at GET "Business Consulting"

What else do mentors get besides money?​

As research by Coqual has shown:

• 57% of mentors gain new skills because they learn from their own trainees,
• 43% begin to better understand clients, especially when it comes to a younger audience close in age to the clients they are mentoring,
• 30% learn about new market segments and interact more effectively with customers,
• 66% of mentors are satisfied with their ability to solve complex problems.

Mentoring helps the mentor himself to understand almost any issue more deeply. For example, to explain how the process of reading from the object storage of the new generation corporate mail Mailion occurs, it is necessary to touch upon many issues. It is necessary to dive into pieces of code that were written by other developers. At the same time, it is not enough to understand what is happening in a particular section of the code, it is important to competently and correctly convey your thoughts to the mentee.
Alexander Novichkov, developer at MyOffice

Mentoring helps mentors boost their self-esteem: they feel that their experience is important and experience positive emotions when they are asked to devote time to the development of another person. For mentors who work freelance, mentoring is a source of feedback that helps them analyze the effectiveness of their work.

A few months ago, I conducted a survey of our mentors on the topic of motivation. Many become mentors because of the desire to share experience, work with people, and realize themselves not only within the framework of a project. For our company, mentoring is a very important area. Every year, we hold an internal conference, EnterConf, where we award everyone involved in mentoring processes.
Natalia Maksimova, head of the mentor group in the QA direction of SimbirSoft

The study also found that mentors get positive emotions from knowing that they are helping people. It is important for mentors that their contribution to another person is measurable, so that the results of their efforts are visible.

So, being a mentor is useful because:

• They pay extra for mentoring.
• Mentors rise quickly through the ranks.
• During interviews, preference is given to candidates with mentoring experience.
• Mentors often become team leaders.
• Mentors learn a lot.
• Mentoring increases self-esteem and job satisfaction.

Tell us in the comments how often you met with mentors at work - or with interns as a mentor.

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