For the last few years I’ve volunteered as a mentor with the One Million Mentor programme:
1MM mentoring empowers young people to become the best version of themselves: building relationships -free of assumption and judgement – where they benefit from another’s experience and perspective and can think bigger, find their own answers and take the next meaningful step into their future. We recruit, train and deploy volunteer mentors, matching them with mentees, providing high quality support to both so that they are well prepared and can have an effective and impactful mentoring relationship. Our mentoring is one to one, for young people aged 14-25 years old, for 1 hour, once a month, for up to a year.
It’s a great national initiative that I am glad to be part of and I found the training really interesting, especially as most of my work normally focuses on coaching and mentoring leaders and managers. Being part of the journey to support a much younger mentee is a different proposition and I’ve learnt a lot along the way.
Entering a career
One of the key questions that I work on with my mentees is finding a way into a career, either via higher education or an apprenticeship, or maybe through local initiatives and training schemes. Most of the time, the kind of questions they have are very similar to the questions my coaching clients ponder: they think about what they want to do, what needs a new job needs to meet and what progressing pathways are available. They often wonder about whether certain qualifications or certificates are worth having, and are always keen to hear from peers who have gone through similar experiences.
Articulating skills
We also work a lot on articulating skills and strengths. Just like the reflective approaches needed later in one’s career in order to determine and champion one’s achievements, so do early career mentees need strategies that help translate capabilities into their CVs and applications.
It’s an awareness that’s very valuable to develop, but it can be difficult at any stage of professional practice. Developing confidence and reflective practice on what types of work might suit best is even harder when you don’t have a lot of experience to draw on.
Reading the landscape
One other question that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how to read the landscape of the sector or the broader area that the mentee is interested in. Is it growing or are there issues to be aware of? Are there a lot of jobs? What kind of professional bodies are there? What is the sector like for someone like them?
Often we come across really interesting sounding initiatives that are designed to help young people into the sector, but are clearly not designed for anyone to actually reach out directly. It can be intimidating and difficult to find a route in.
As we are just at the beginning of a new year of volunteering, I am mindful that there’s now more uncertainty in the job markets, and I am looking forward to supporting my mentee through the ups and downs of finding their first role.
