Mentoring in Software Industry

Many times people think that mentoring is just training people and making them learn certain skill set by giving few classes and the jobs' done. Rather it has all of these things like tutoring, knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing etc engulfed in itself.

Mentoring is lot more than just training and advising people. It is actually you as a Mentor taking responsibility and ownership of making sure that whoever you are mentoring becomes successful and learns how to use certain skill set or knowledge for personal and organizational growth.

Mentoring means following up regularly and monitoring the progress closely. It means making people understand technical topics easily and ensuring that people remember these things without much revision.

For example: if you tell a person that bash_profile is a file that saves certain paths and configuration settings on your mac and this file gets loaded before your terminal loads shell environment etc. Then it will be very difficult for someone to understand this. But if you tell them that a bash_profile can save short forms or aliases for certain commands that you use or type usually, and it can also be used to save path to a certain directory under a shortcut or can be used to save certain access keys etc then the person will remember this for long and can easily know what the practical application of the bash_profile is.

Mentoring helps a Mentor to understand judge his/her capabilities and also lets them know that how well they communicate. Another important aspect of mentoring software engineers is that we need to keep track of all the mentoring/training sessions with proper documentation. This helps people to easily follow the steps and follow the instructions when they need to recall something in future.

1. Make fear go away: Make sure that you infuse confidence in your mentees that coding or learning a new tech tool or programming language is not difficult and they have nothing to fear as you are always available to help them
2. Go easy with sessions: Plan sessions to go easy on the mentees. Make sure the initial sessions are short and are precisely pointing out the ways by which it will help them.
3. Always have practical exercises during sessions: Remember only theory never helps unless your mentees are armchair detectives. A little bit of practical session will always help them retain the knowledge for long and will give them opportunities to ask questions and explore.
4. Document as you go: Document each session as you go along giving training sessions. This will help in future by providing references and create a central knowledge repository to share and expand.
5. Test and Analyze: Regularly take frequent quizzes so that you can judge the level of understanding that mentees are holding.
6. Encourage: Give kudos to good mentees so that they are motivated to do even better.
7. Give space to explore on their own: Give them time to explore certain problems on their own so that they can develop self-exploratory and problem solving skills.
8. Continue the above cycle: Proceed with the above points until all the desired skill sets are developed.

This is how I perceive and try to mentor software engineers. Feel free to provide suggestions/feedbacks. Thanks for the read!

Later on we can deep dive in to how it actually works but the first step is to make people understand the need or application of the thing we are trying to tell them about