Mentoring
I’d become a mentor—if someone taught me how
As some of you probably know, I am a fairly active member of several professional communities. One of them is “я-ИТ-ы”. I will not go into detail about the community, since anyone who is interested can find information about it without much trouble.
I joined “я-ИТ-ы” just over a year ago at the invitation of Airat Khusnutdinov. Over the course of that year, I have managed to:
- Take part in numerous managerial duels;
- Attend several in-person events;
- Go to one of the community’s two biggest annual events—its New Year celebration.
The second major annual event, “ИТ-ночь на Ивана Купалу”, will take place this coming weekend. It will be my first time there, but despite that, my colleagues in the community consider me “seasoned” enough to entrust me with an important role: mentoring several newcomers.
I have known one of them, Andrey Guskov, very well for many years. I was also the one who brought him into the community, so it is hardly surprising that I was entrusted with his onboarding. I will find out in the next day or two who else I will be mentoring.
I was struck by the structured approach the community takes to passing knowledge from more experienced members to those with less experience. Prospective mentors have an entire training programme, with clearly defined steps, learning materials and recommendations, as well as a system for testing what they have learnt. I spent this weekend learning about the history and traditions of “я-ИТ-ы”, taking a test (see the first photo) and attending a briefing on how to onboard my mentees properly (see the second photo). Thank you to Денис Андреадис for the briefing. During the training, I was surprised to learn that the entire mentoring process also has to be recorded in a dedicated system—it is an IT community, after all 😎
I had never thought about mentoring from the mentor’s perspective before—I had always been the mentee. At first, I was surprised to discover that it is not so simple. Then I realised that it is a distinct kind of work, with its own subtleties and complexities. Naturally enough, it has its own tools, methods, theoretical foundations and practical case studies.
I am glad that being part of the community is helping me grow.
