The indisputable value of mentoring for engineers
Tony Pallone | October 28, 2019In Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey,” the Greek king Odysseus leaves home to fight in the Trojan War, leaving his friend Mentor to look after his son. As noted by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), this is the origin of the term “mentoring” — an age-old tradition in which an experienced and trusted adviser provides guidance and support to someone just starting out.
The NSPE offers a handful of mentoring resources in its online Career Center, and it’s not alone: a number of colleges and universities have formal mentoring programs for engineering students, and many companies establish mentoring programs for new staff. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) also offers an online program that matches its members to form mutually beneficial partnerships.
The “mutually beneficial” concept is key to the success of any mentoring program. Both parties need to be invested, which is most apt to be the case when both parties stand to gain from the relationship. For a newcomer to the field, working with a mentor offers the potential for developing new skill sets and competencies, expanding one’s professional network and getting encouragement to face challenges. For a mentor, the process provides an opportunity to share knowledge and experience, enhance one’s personal brand and keep things fresh. Both sides get the chance to see things from another’s perspective, as well.
Yet at present the onus often falls upon the mentee to get the relationship started. Those with more experience in the field are more likely to feel they are too busy to seek out mentoring opportunities; if they see themselves as a graduate of the “school of hard knocks,” they may have never developed an appreciation for the potential benefits. This is changing, however, as more engineers are entering the profession with the expectation of mentorship as part of any job offer. As a result, the expectation of spending time as a mentor may eventually be anticipated, even embraced, by the older generation — it’s a way to pay back the help they received when the shoe was on the other foot.
If no mentoring program is in place, getting one started can hone valuable collaborative skills for all stakeholders. One can easily find a plethora of good advice that itself can serve as a mentor to building new structures.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), for instance, suggests that a mentoring program within a company should be separate from regular work-related projects. The goal for the mentee is not to get a promotion — it’s to improve as an employee. It should begin with an evaluation of areas where help is most needed, and the openness principle wherein “the only dumb question is the one not asked” should apply.
The ASME also points out that possessing the skills directly related to one’s job as an engineer does not necessarily translate to mentoring know-how. Navigating the relationship comes from sharing experiences and learning which way to nudge, which is a very different skill from engineers’ prime directive of developing technical solutions to world problems.
The backstory of Plato is similarly instructive. Speaking in Medium.com, company co-founder Quang Hoang describes an odyssey of his own that began with the desire to build an expense-managing mobile app, which transformed into a bot designed to perform the same task on the Slack platform, and ultimately turned into a company that provides mentoring as a service. Along the way, he learned that hiring developers based solely on technical skills and overlooking the need to support them in the workplace culture resulted in success at raising money — and total failure at building the company. “Every single one of our developers quit,” he said.
By looking back over his own positive experiences as a mentee, Hoang and his partners turned the company around. Their new focus became providing mentoring sessions to help engineers make the leap from individual contributors to managers, something he said was noticeably lacking in the landscape of engineering mentoring at the time.
As Homer wrote, “The journey is the thing.” A solid mentoring program can make it far smoother than the one taken by the ancient hero of his famous tale.