Advance your tech career with a mentor

The status of your career

If you started in a medium plus size tech company, a typical promotion path will look like (grade names may be different):

- After 1 year from junior engineer to engineer

- Additional 1–2 yr to senior engineer

- Additional 2–3 yr to staff engineer

- Additional 2–4 yr to team lead

- Additional 3–5 yr to manager

To get to a team lead will typically take 5–10 years, and a manger 10+ years.

If your career path is similar to the above you are just doing average. You can do much better, but how?

Finding advice

We can find a lot of advice. From many books, videos, lectures, notes, phrases, friends, family and all these provide a wealth of knowledge and experience. So why are we not sure what to do next?

There are many reasons, among them:

- Knowing the rules does not translate easily to our specific situation. I need to increase my visibility in the organization, but how exactly do I do it in my situation?

- We are creatures of habits. Changing behavior is difficult and is a long term process.

- Our actions are significantly determined by our emotions, not our thoughts. Our reasoning is used many times to justify our decision and not to make it (we first make the decision and justify it later).

- Lack of feedback and follow-up. Follow-up and feedback enable us to better implement, internalize and strengthen our new mode of behavior. Many are moved by a powerful presentation for change, just to return to the old self several days or weeks later.

Training versus Mentoring

Training can provide you with the rules and guidelines and some examples that will help you understand how to implement them. That will work well for technical areas, but is not very effective when you need to change your behavior.

A mentor will follow you for a long time and provide, in addition to the rules, the exact actions and feedback that you need for your specific situation and goals. The majority of the items you need to change to improve your career are behavioral, not technical. A mentor is more effective in helping you achieve that.

What can a mentor do to help your career?

- Analyze your situation and goals

- Analyze your goals in relation to your organization and help you identify opportunities

- Prepare a plan based on your strength, weaknesses and the organization opportunities

- Prepare specific actions that are clear and concise. You know exactly what to do next.

- Periodically monitor your progress and update your actions based on performance and new developments.

Examples

So everything sound great, but where are the details? I selected a few examples that are common to many.

Visibility — I need to increase it but how? There are many people who have more experience, more knowledge or better skills, what do I do?

Surprisingly it is quite easy and here are some specific actions:

- Ask questions in a company wide or group wide meetings. Do not wait for the Q&A time to come up with a question, prepare several questions in advance. Talk to your peers and get feedback on the questions or areas that are of interest to them, check recent company news, upcoming events etc. Ask questions that are intelligent, open ended (does not require a one phrase answer), and will make the person who answers look good (never ask a negative question). Do it consistently and you will be surprised how many people will know your name. For example ask: “can you elaborate on how improving our customer relationship improved our sales, and if possible provide some examples so we can take these lessons to other areas? “

- Speak in meetings, every meeting. If you have nothing to contribute simply summarize and repeat other people ideas in your own words. For example: “so to increase the performance we need to redesign the interface between module A and module B?” If everyone else is talking too make sure that you sound different, lower your voice, slow pitch etc.

Improve your status

You have only a few years experience and you need to improve your image with many people in the group having more years of experience. Sound familiar? Looks difficult? Shall you just wait in line for your turn?

Perception is reality, and luckily there is a lot you can do to improve your status perception and with time it will become your reality.

- Become the go to person in your group. The one that everyone goes to ask questions and get help. The easiest way to do that is simply say “yes” to whatever people are asking you. Very quickly anyone that needs help, especially people from other groups, will come to you first for help (if you are an engineer your product manager, project manager, operation manager will love you). Your status will rise and that will positively impact your career. Even if you do not know the answer say “yes but it will take me some time” and find who can help you solve the issue. This is powerful technique; just make sure that you are not overwhelmed.

- Train other people. Volunteer to train the new hire and other groups. Whoever you train will look at you as the senior and that will improve your status. It will also help you significantly in your performance review.

- Present your work; prepare presentations to your team members, management, other groups etc. The more you present the better. Presentations are important tool so learn how to do them effectively (they are not information dump but a story).

Performance review

We all hate it. We need to prepare, fill forms, remember what we did half a year ago, ask for feedback and fear what the outcome is. So what can you do?

Your performance review is the most important single event in the year. It is the time when management evaluates you and decides on your future. It is not something you want to do as a passive side activity but thoroughly prepare and get the maximum out of it.

- The first thing to understand is that your performance is measured in multiple areas. If you are in a technical field you may think that your technical accomplishments are the most important and anything else is insignificant in comparison. This is a common mistake that can carry a high cost. Typically performance is measured in multiple areas, and although some areas may have higher weight they are all equally important, that is a low score will have high negative impact.

- Begin with understanding what areas you are measured at. Typically you will have your direct responsibility and some soft-skill areas like team work, leadership, communication etc. Take all of them very seriously and make sure you have a lot to say and demonstrate in each. During the year take notes of all your accomplishments in each area and make sure you have several in each. Do that periodically, every week or two. If you see that some areas are missing spend the time to find opportunities to fill them or talk to your manager for recommendation.

Why so few examples?

Your raises and promotions are decided by comparing you to your peers. The details are important, and you need to tune your actions to your specific circumstances. To be effective you need to find the opportunities in your position and organization that will set you apart.

How much of a difference can a mentor make?

Everyone is different, but an entry level engineer with a career development plan and a mentor was able to reach a team lead position in three years. That is about half the typical time.

What to do next?

Check my other posts and articles for additional career development insight.

If you are a tech engineer with 0–5 yr experience, you are invited to join my career development mentoring group. Contact me for more details.