Rookie (or a year of mentoring)

For the past few years I have volunteered as a mentor for the 1 Million Mentors programme, a national initiative that provides free career focused mentoring for 16-25 year olds. This week another year of mentoring comes to an end, and so I want to reflect on how it went and what I take away from the experience.

Confidence and Perspective, the image featuring in this post created by Bryan Mathers / Visual Thinkery, relates very well to how I felt as a mentor and at times when putting myself in the shoes of my mentee.

Rookie year

This was my first time mentoring a final year undergraduate. As my previous experience as a volunteer mentor was with mentees looking to move into post-16 education or training and my professional coaching clients are mostly in employment already, you might call it a ‘Rookie’ year for me. It was all about finding my way in the very fast moving, competitive undergraduate recruitment market.

That is my first take away from this year: it was a new challenge that kept me on my toes, and that is always a good thing.

AI and recruitment

Both in my work with clients and in my own experience I have come up against how far and how deeply AI-powered tools and platforms are changing recruitment. However, I found the practices we encountered through our mentoring work even more stark and opaque. Entry-level, science-based jobs lend themselves well, it seems, to automation, and that can make the process of applying for opportunities difficult and disheartening (at all stages of one’s career, but especially, I would say, at the beginning).

That brings me to my next take-away: authenticity is key to making any part of the recruitment process meaningful. Any practice that doesn’t allow for that deters good candidates.

Connecting in safety

Much of my work happens on the open web and I am an advocate for open practices, including open leadership practice. That said, this year’s mentoring experience really made me question how well we are doing in Higher Education to help students gain not only skills but also the confidence to connect in a way that feels safe to them.

Kudos to the mentoring programme, which provides excellent training on safeguarding and sharing information. But beyond the confines of institutional provision, the open web, especially social media platforms like LinkedIn, soon became problematic or felt unsafe.

My take away here is that there is a palpable pressure to optimise yourself and your online identity which is in conflict with the aforementioned desire for authenticity and finding meaningful work connections and opportunities.

Students welcome, but…

One of the sessions that made me reflect the most was a day when we looked at professional bodies and industry organisations that were explicitly trying to welcome students and recent graduates.

As soon as we dug a little deeper, the friendly welcome turned into incomprehensible next steps. There was little to go on for a student looking to learn more about a specific career path or connect with professionals in their chosen field.

Having worked in this space for much of my career I was disappointed to see just how hard to navigate this was – and just how much confidence was needed to take that first step into a new profession.

This resonates closely with my coaching work, in which building confidence is a theme for both emerging and established leaders – particularly when connecting or collaborating online.

Home and work

Lastly, and this made me reflect a lot on how to build confidence and find perspective, is the role of home study and home working in all this. In my research for my new book I’ve come across data that indicates strong disparities between how established and new employees experience virtual work, and this affects early career workers still more.

Food for thought for me and my research, and a highly complex challenge for leaders and their institutions.