Exploring Early Career — Part 3: Finding and Leveraging a Mentor
Co-authored by Varsha Balasubramaniam
Stepping into a new career, whether you’re a recent graduate or shifting your professional focus, can feel overwhelming. Effectively navigating your new environment while expanding your knowledge and network presents a challenge that, if approached with care, can foster professional growth in many rewarding ways. In the early stages of your career, the choices you make and the resources you leverage can significantly shape the way in which you impact your community and contribute as a developer!
This series will outline tips and strategies that will make this daunting endeavor a bit more digestible and help you leverage the resources you’re given to identify your strengths and build a robust network to propel your career.
Roadmap
- Understanding what the expectations are for yourself as an early-in-career engineer
- Learning how to navigate a relationship with your manager(s)
- Finding and learning from mentorship
- Owning your career growth
Having a mentor to guide you through the landscape of your new career can help propel your growth forward and accelerate your learning journey. This segment focuses on the benefits of leveraging a mentor and tips for finding mentorship at your company.
What is a mentor?
A mentor should be a person who you can go to for both career and technical advice! Early in your career, having a mentor and actively engaging in a mentor-mentee relationship does not only show you are proactive about your career and adopt a growth mindset, but it is a strategic move in unlocking your full potential as an engineer. Having a mentor allows you to more effectively familiarize yourself with your tech stack and environment, as observing someone else’s workflow helps you come up with what best works for you. Your mentor can also unlock doors for you by introducing you to new resources and connections within the workplace that will allow you to grow your toolbox and foster an environment where trust, support, and knowledge exchange can flourish. It’s also important to note that most senior engineers have leveraged a mentor in their career to help them grow and level up, and many maintain mentorships throughout all levels. Remember that there is always more to learn and always someone to learn from!
A mentor should be a person who is generally in a more senior position as they have more experience and can transfer their knowledge to you. Also, having already gone through this phase of their career, they know best how to navigate growth and can help you find opportunities. Your mentor(s) can be on or outside of your team, there are merits to both. Having a mentor outside of your team can be hugely beneficial as they can provide you unbiased advice that isn’t influenced by anything else that is going on in your immediate team, whereas those within your team will best know how to help you grow into your spot on the team as they have first hand exposure to the skillset and work you do on a daily basis.
The search for mentorship begins
When searching for mentorship, ask yourself what opportunities are you looking for and what would best benefit you out of this relationship? You can have different types of mentors. For instance, someone on your team or group may be a good mentor for technical advice, as they are close to the work you are doing, but someone outside your team can be good for career advice or help with technical growth outside of your day to day team’s work. Some can even help you navigate the transition into your new career as this time can be overwhelming. Knowing you have the support and someone you can look to for advice alleviates some of that pressure.
Having a mentor can also be beneficial for your organization. Mentorships are symbiotic. Asking someone to help you grow may be a great opportunity for them to demonstrate their leadership and mastery and grow in their careers and influence as well!
If you’re having trouble finding a mentor, you can work with your manager on finding mentorship. Assuming you meet with your manager on a regular basis, your manager should be able to assess your needs and help connect you with a suitable mentor. If you are from an underrepresented group and want to have a mentor from an underrepresented group at your company, let your manager know and they can help you find mentors that you are able to relate to! Having shared experiences with your mentor, although not necessary, may be advantageous because they will know what struggles you face and show you how to best navigate certain situations in your career growth.
Get the most out of your relationship: maximizing on conversations
Once you have a mentor, then you definitely want to dive in with them. It is very common to not know exactly what to ask your mentor — three big areas a mentor can help you out with is career development, technical skill development, and navigation of teams and processes. Listed below are some potential questions to guide conversations with your mentor.
Career Development
- What are your goals? What do you hope to achieve in 6 months versus 1 years versus 2 years? You can chat through with your mentor to see what they have observed with early level engineers in the past or what they have experienced themselves
- What does an early-in-career engineer at your company look like? How can you become a stronger junior engineer and navigate to the next level?
- How do I approach a career conversation with my manager?
- How do I work with my manager/team to set goals for myself to level up and track how I am doing against those goals?
- How do I make it known to my team that I want to level up?
- What are the types of projects I should take on?
Technical Skills Development
- How and why to become an owner of a feature or piece of code
- How to build flowcharts and when are they the most useful
- How to lead a technical project
- How to review PRs — what should you look for?
- Generally how to write good code
- How to model data
- How to design a good API
- Processes of writing tests and debugging
- How/where to learn about tools that your team uses
- How to start getting involved in work such as those that would impact Better Engineering
Navigating being on a team
- How to speak up and share your ideas with members of your team especially senior folks
- How to make your work visible
- How to stay focused on project work and execution — and avoid unnecessary glue work — while still a junior engineer
- What happens if you aren’t fitting into your team/other issues you may face with teammates or with your manager
- Strategies to start getting more involved in your team’s projects
Your mentor can be your champion! The more you interact with others, the more people can speak about your abilities in spaces where this can be important, such as performance reviews (more about this in part 4). Having someone you can relate to, talk to, and point to for advice on your career at work is critical in accelerating your success. Being comfortable in your community allows you to absorb more, gain more experiences, and take pride in what you do and what you can build as a team!
