Mentoring III

With mentoring being one of my goals for the year I have already started to invest some time into thinking about how to be a better mentor. There are a lot of articles about mentoring software engineers out there, most of which are pretty uninspired, but fortunately I did find one that I thought was useful, and I plan to implement many of the recommendations into my own work.

The thing that has struck me the most about pursuing this goal in 2022 though is how easy it is to see a clear path for someone else’s career improvement and then to be really excited about pursuing that path. After having asked my mentee about their goals, in the process of brainstorming ways of working toward them I found it remarkably easy to think of sessions we could do that would be not only valuable but engaging and (hopefully) fun too, as well as numerous exercises I could prescribe that actually would be incredibly worthwhile doing to cement my own knowledge and skills.

Looking closely at someone else’s career progrsesion has given me a new perspective on my own, and I hope that this newfound clarity will go some way to alleviating some of the lack of professional direction I’ve felt recently.