How to Choose the Perfect Mentor for Your Career: A Comprehensive Guide

There is often a point in our lives when we look for a better career opportunity. It can be a pressing need or just a relaxed search for a better job, sometimes due to a sudden move to another city or even relocating to another country. While some people find themselves jobless without any warning signs in advance, others sense potential threats, such as rumors spreading that the company is going to cut costs, restructure the personnel, and lay off half of them. Some people have a good package yet are looking to revamp their careers with a mentor to begin feeling satisfaction with life-work balance, feeling that they do what brings other people undisputed value. Choosing a mentor who understands your specific career goals can make all the difference in such scenarios.

If you are rethinking your career objectives, looking for a perfect mentor, and feeling lost among all the propositions available on the web, you’ve come to the right place. Knowing how to choose a mentor is essential to avoid wasting time and resources on someone who isn’t the right fit.

Also, read Five Signs You Need a Career Coach

When we think of the word 'career,' we imagine being employed; yet it’s good to remember that the career path of a businessperson is also described with the word 'career.' That being said, a mentor for your career can be someone nurturing your business ideas and business plan. In our comprehensive guide for choosing a good mentor, we will try to cover both scenarios: mentor for employment and mentor for business.

Be it a career emergency or planned career growth, you will surely benefit from the right mentor. Here’s the thing: while mentorship matters as it minimizes your risk in hit-and-miss situations, it’s essential to choose the proper mentor from the start, and our comprehensive guide is meant to help you. There are some key traits you can look for in a mentor and certain mistakes you want to avoid. Stick around to find out.

Why Mentorship Matters

It’s in human nature to have a short attention span (8.25 seconds according to the latest research, which is shorter than that of the goldfish!). We get sidetracked easily. It gets even worse if you are neurodiverse, with ADHD or similar conditions, and may be unaware or undiagnosed. The external person who is willing to coach, mentor, and guide you in your career steps is priceless. If you find the right dedicated mentor, cling to this noble human seriously. Try to build a long-lasting relationship with such a person. What to look for in a mentor depends on your individual needs, whether it's career advice, emotional support, or specific skills.

A mentor can have various motivations, intrinsic and extrinsic; what matters is the will to mentor your case and the willingness to communicate and support you with appropriate courses of action. Free will matters; otherwise, you might feel uncomfortable trying to contact your mentor each time, as if you are imposing yourself on them.

Interacting with a mentor on a regular basis will put you back on track and help you align all your career steps with your goal of getting a new job, obtaining professional education, or relocating from one department to another within the same company. Under the supervision of a mentor who fits the task, you would have a substantial chance to juggle all the various challenges while maintaining career development and still taking good care of other spheres of your life, from children to sports and love. That is the case if you are lucky enough to find the right mentor.

How to Choose the Right Mentor

With the abundance of free information accessible at your fingertips, you are fortunate (or unfortunate?) to have vast resources to look up any bit of knowledge that puzzles you. Choosing the right mentor is easy; you just have to know where to find mentors who meet your basic criteria, then sift through them with the next layer of requirements. After that, propose to each of them and see who agrees and who remains consistently helpful. A good idea is to keep a pool of the best mentors, so if it doesn’t work with one mentor, you can approach another. One of the possible filters here is cost: are you going to look for free mentors or pay a fee for their service? What are your budget constraints? When considering things to look for in a mentor, don’t overlook factors such as availability, shared values, and alignment with your goals.

Where to choose the right mentor:

• Social media e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit
• Dedicated niche communities, online and offline
• Professional conferences, industry events
• Miranna App

On LinkedIn, you are granted a unique opportunity to approach specific people from specific domains, even if you have a free account; though Premium provides many great features such as the option to write a message in someone’s inbox. Study people from interesting spheres — those who have achieved a great deal but are still approachable — and prepare a tailored personal message stating where exactly you need mentorship, how you imagine this process, and what efforts you have already made. Remember to check for correct grammar and spelling, as well as the properly spelled name of your addressee.

When dealing with niche communities, it’s good to remember, that due to the expansion of social media into our lives and abundance of people selling their services on the web, you have the widest and wildest choice of helpers of any kind out there. We recommend that you be picky: select a community cautiously, analyze their website and group, gather enough reviews, observe their organization and style of communication, and then decide if you trust their judgment in selecting a career mentor from their community.

Recurring industry events, tech meetups, and large conferences are your ticket to new business relationships, where you can approach a mentor or someone who knows a potentially good mentor. You build rapport and have a one-on-one conversation in person. Attending professional events unprepared is a major waste of opportunity, so we recommend that you learn the latest industry trends and names, prepare an app, or at least have a fully charged smartphone where you can write down and take photos to save new contacts and notes about new people you just met. Networking is an uneasy task; however, when it’s done properly, it becomes your safety net. This is why it’s worth the effort.

Miranna provides exclusive resources for career and business growth, and we continuously try to be on top of all the contemporary demands, growing our professional mentors and coaches within a women-oriented ecosystem. Our woman-to-woman coaching and mentorship app for iOS and Android users. The range of services from our career mentors allows you to come up with a tailored set of services to meet your specific career goal; basically, it can be anything from your CV review and enhancing your networking skills to a written strategy on how to ask for a raise and get that raise, boost your leadership abilities, and avoid burnout altogether.

We keep the Miranna mentors database up to date; there you may find details about each mentor, including their professional background, specialty, and publications. The search is convenient with handy filters to look up by sphere of applied knowledge. The Miranna mentor app has a built-in calendar that shows time slots of availability and makes the booking process flawless.

Key Traits to Look for in a Mentor

Only you can name the key traits needed for you in your perfect mentor; however, allow us to suggest some guidelines. Ask yourself: 'Who is your mentor? Are they someone who inspires and challenges you?' The right mentor should help you connect the dots and create actionable plans for success. See the table below.

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A useful rule of thumb is that a good mentor is able to connect the dots you provide to derive a scheme, a feasible action plan. Even if they lack certain domain knowledge, they are open to education; they make an effort and learn on the go. Also a good mentor may be a professional with a 'been there, done that' setting who is able to create on a blank canvas without many dots provided.

There are some specific traits, for example, voice. If a mentor's voice is distracting or simply unpleasant, it can become a deal-breaker for some mentees. So make sure it’s comfortable for you to talk to your mentor and to listen to their voice, especially if your preferred way of getting new bits of information is through audio channels.

Common Mistakes When Choosing a Mentor

Some common mistakes when choosing a mentor boil down to limiting your choice with prejudice, judging potential mentors based on their age, gender, ethnicity, or affiliation with a specific domain. There are people who choose by looks; they would be uncomfortable with a short female mentor having a melodic, quiet voice and would choose a tall, radiant person with a resonant, impressive voice. 

Needless to say, this biased approach is 'cringe,' and you can suffer from it in the long term as you limit yourself heavily from the start. The good news is that age and appearance often don’t matter; your mentor can be of the same age as you or even younger. Young age doesn’t automatically mean lack of knowledge. Many other qualities can be irrelevant to your needs, and the main thing you should ask yourself is, 'Does this serve my purpose? Does this mentor help my case?'

The most shocking revelation for some mentees is that it’s not necessary for a good career mentor to be specialized in your field; this domain knowledge can be obtained on the go. It is much more important for a mentor to have broader skills to guide you through leadership practices, networking, and team-building, as well as how to motivate other people and gain support for your goals.

Key Takeaways

A right mentor for you to achieve personal and professional growth is nearly a must-have nowadays, as it’s too challenging to navigate all your questions on your own. The right mentor can significantly enhance your career or business trajectory by providing professional guidance tailored specifically to your requests and answering your specific questions. If you build a strong mentor-mentee relationship with the right person, it fosters accountability from both sides, growth opportunities to advance within your current or future role, and attention to new horizons.

In summary, investing efforts in finding a matching mentor means developing meaningful connections within your chosen industry, bringing you closer to your desired outcome.

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