Building a career alone and single-handedly is always a tempting idea for talented professionals, but only a small portion of mentoring can often do miracles for the young guns. It’s not an opinion but rather a well-known fact:

Over 80% of employees say mentors help them avoid costly mistakes and become proficient in their roles faster.
Almost 80% of professionals who have a mentor view their mentoring relationship as being important to their overall success.

After many years of experience and cooperation with CEOs and career experts, we finally decided to prepare a list of tips mentoring for talented employees. In this post, we will explain the concept of mentorship and show you how to find a good mentor in six simple steps.

What Is Mentorship: Definition and Traits

If you want to find a perfect business coach for your set of skills and professional aspirations, first you need to understand what it really means to be a mentor. This is the only way to be sure who to look for.

By definition, a mentor is someone who gives a younger individual help and advice over a period of time, especially in relation to the job. To put it simply, you are looking for a person who already walked in your shoes and figured out how to solve the problems you are dealing with. An ideal candidate for the mentorship role has a highly specific set of traits:

Relevant knowledge and experience: A mentor must have enough skills and professional experience to teach you new things about your job and industry in general. For instance, content analysts should look for a skilled author who wrote numerous industry reports such as the www.aussiessay.com.

Professional enthusiasm: This person needs to be energetic and upbeat, showing no signs of slowing down or getting bored over time.

Empathy: As an experienced professional, a mentor should show empathy and understand how you feel and why you behave the way you do.

Excellent communication skills: Of course, a mentor can hardly teach you anything if he/she doesn’t possess a full set of excellent communication skills.

6 Tips to Find a Perfect Mentor

Now that you understand what it means to be a good mentor, you can start the search and focus on finding the right person for this role. We prepared for you six practical tips for identifying the best mentor.

1. Get to know your needs

Before you begin looking for a mentor, you need to determine your priorities and figure out the skills you would like to develop or improve. Make sure to answer one simple question – why do I need a mentor?

Jake Gardner, a headhunter at 123helpme, says the first task is to do your homework and prepare for searching a business tutor: “Do you want to learn about the industry as a whole? Perhaps you want to improve a highly specific set of skills such as interpersonal communication? These are the two completely different goals and each one will probably require a different type of person to help you.”

2. Identify a mentor

Now that you know what you want, it is time to search and identify the right mentor. Of course, the easiest solution is to find someone from your closes environment because it makes the mentoring process simpler and more convenient.

There is, however, another option and that is to look for a person outside of your team or company. In this case, you should conduct online research to see who fits the traits we mentioned in the previous chapter.

3. Analyze his/her personality

Instead of taking action immediately, we strongly encourage you to consider another very important detail. Namely, you need to make sure that the person you’re about to contact fits your core values. After all, you don’t want to end up closely cooperating with someone you can’t stand or even hate. A mentor must be an individual who is eager to show empathy and understanding, thus making the joint work better and more comfortable.

4. Reach out to your mentor

The time has come to approach your mentor and ask for help. This is often a difficult task for young professionals, but don’t be afraid of reaching out to the targeted colleague. Keep in mind that your request will make a mentor feel acknowledged, so it will be hard to turn you down.

No matter how you do it – in person or via email – we recommend you to be direct and straightforward. Don’t waste anyone’s time and explain briefly what makes you interested in learning from this person. In case you do it concisely and politely, rest assured a mentor will like it.

5. Make it seem effortless

Another advice is to make the mentorship as effortless as possible. You don’t want to bombard a mentor with tons of messages every day or make him/her work overtime. On the contrary, follow a mentor’s schedule and let this person be in charge of timing and planning. Doing so, the whole process will seem faster, easier, and less time-consuming.

6. Show appreciation

The worst thing that can happen is to find a perfect mentor and fail to show any signs of appreciation. We are not only talking about saying “Thank you” but rather about proving that you are worth his/her time.

Michael Jacobsen, a CEO, says that having a mentor means you must work twice as hard and learn very quickly: “It’s the best way to prove that you enjoy working with the mentor, while he/she will be glad to keep helping and supporting you professionally.”

Conclusion

Working solo is great if you are eager to learn everything the hard way, but finding a mentor can help you to kickstart a career and save a lot of precious time. The only problem is to identify the right person for this job and approach him/her delicately.

In this article, we showed you how to find a good mentor based on tips and suggestions from CEOs and career experts. Keep our suggestions in mind and feel free to use them – it could give your career a brand new boost very soon!