Why does a mentor need mentoring? 5 reasons to mentor juniors.

[Man]

Today I would like to tell you about mentoring, and why specialists need it at all. This article is based on personal experience and feedback from developers who have been both mentors and students

It's no secret that academic knowledge obtained at university can be useful, but rarely applicable in real life. The path to becoming a specialist is most often tied to self-study and hours spent on Google, YouTube and various specialized courses. Well, what can you do, we live in a time when if you need something, you have to fight for it yourself. The blue-bordered saucer is given out in limited edition, and those who get this saucer are often given contemptuous comments along the lines of: "Dad did everything for him. He can't do anything himself."

Often, to become a truly high-class specialist, people spend years, or even decades, and the thought of sharing their accumulated experience and knowledge scares many people. "I spent so much effort, time and money to become who I am, so why should I just give it all to someone else?" The thought is understandable, and certainly has the right to exist, but like everything in this world, it has certain "BUTs".

Let's take things one by one. What is mentoring?​

Mentoring is a method of informal learning, during which a more experienced specialist helps another less experienced colleague to develop. The phenomenon of mentoring itself migrated into our lives from business, where it implied that more experienced colleagues would train less experienced ones. But in our time, this phenomenon is becoming more and more widespread. Beginning developers are increasingly working with independent mentors, since this method is more effective than simply spending hours delving into Indian videos on YouTube. The advantages for students are obvious:

• The opportunity to learn from the experience of a stronger specialist.
• Live connection with the teacher. You can always get feedback on your work, they will definitely point out the mistake and tell you how to correct it and not make it in the future.
• Real cases. Don't forget that mentors are not professional teachers and most often, in order to teach you something or show you something, they will use cases from their practical experience, and not overwhelm you with unnecessary information.
• The opportunity to work on live projects during the training process. Let's be honest, many mentors dump their current tasks on their students under the guise of "training". And personally, I don't see anything wrong with this, because for the student it's an opportunity to gain practical experience, and for the mentor to pay more attention to complex tasks. The main thing is to then monitor what your mentee has done, otherwise you will be the one being taught.

But what can mentoring give to the mentor himself, besides hours spent explaining obvious things?

• Mentoring and training experience. You shouldn't assume that only a person with forty years of experience and nine successful businesses behind them can act as a mentor. For a person who is just starting out in a particular field, a mentor can also be a Middle specialist. That is, a person who has already more or less figured out the field and can give a newcomer a starting push. For such specialists, mentoring is a way to pump up their skills in managing and training a team. One of the markers for determining the "seniority" of a company specialist is his ability to develop the rest of the team. And as a duty of a Middle specialist, "working with Junior specialists" is increasingly starting to appear in vacancies. Therefore, such experience will be a good bonus to a resume.
• Avoid "ossification". When doing the same thing for a long time, it is very easy to catch a "blurred look". Working in a pair with young specialists, you have to work through everything again and again and sometimes discover for yourself that "self-evident" is not so obvious, and if you look at it from a different angle, which was not considered before, then you can do something more simply and effectively. Remember that learning can be mutual
• Diversify the routine. One of the most common problems encountered during my career consultations is burnout from the monotony of tasks and lack of live communication. Taking on a young specialist for training is a wonderful opportunity to diversify your work. Almost every student is a unique case in which you will need to find your own approach and the opportunity to deal with more than just routine tasks.
• We will be replaced by those we taught. Remember the old joke about the teachers whose students designed an airplane? "Judging by the way they studied, I'm sure the airplane won't even take off." By passing on our accumulated knowledge and experience to a new generation of specialists, we guarantee ourselves a future. We wouldn't want to be pushed back because of low-skilled specialists.
• Additional income. I put this point last on my list only because not all mentors charge money for their services. But, to be fair, I want to emphasize that any work should be paid, and teaching someone is a very responsible job. So experienced specialists can absolutely calmly count on additional income by taking a beginner specialist under their wing.

It should be noted that everyone can find something useful for themselves in mentoring, and that the reasons listed above are far from the entire list of benefits.

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