It’s more challenging than ever with layoffs gutting teams, knowledge being lost and developers looking for work or knee-deep in their own projects with minimal spare time. The traditional ‘we’ll catch up once a week and discuss your career’ mentor mindset is really hard for most people to manage and commit to at even the best of times.

A lot of people focus on the how of finding a mentor, but often what causes struggles with mentoring is people reaching out without a plan. Mentorship can take a huge number of forms. If you’re after a mentor, there’s a few questions I’d ask yourself first:

• What type of mentorship are you looking for?
  • Are you looking for career mentorship? That is, do you want someone who understands your goals holistically, and knows what motivates you?
    • In this case, you might want someone who has a similar mentality to you - maybe they’ve done things you want to do, or worked at places you admire, even if they’re not necessarily exactly overlapped with your discipline.
  • Are you looking for *personal development mentorship? *****You have a sense of your career and goals, you have strong understanding of your discipline, but you need someone to help you sense check your direction?
    • You might need someone who you trust as a friend or advisor who is more senior than you - they might be in a different space or field, but they have more development, work and life experience that they can share with you when you hit a roadblock.
  • Are you looking for discipline mentorship? That is, do you want someone to help you become a better [discipline]?
    • You might want someone who you look up to in this space, whether you admire their work or are curious how they achieved certain outcomes on certain projects. You’ll want to be clear on what you want to learn from them, and why you can only learn it from them.
  • Are you looking for peer mentorship? That is, do you need peer mentorship where you can tackle problems together, and share your networks?
    • A lot of people underestimate how important peer mentorship is, but it’s critical to development as a creative! This might mean people who are doing similar roles at a similar experience level at other organizations, or similar experience levels in totally different roles to give you insights and guidance.
  • Are you looking for management mentorship? That is, are you leading teams and running into difficulties or issues?
    • You might need someone in your organization who is more senior than you, or in a parallelized org that can offer advice/support. Identifying people on your skill level with similar roles and responsibilities is a great place to start, but this is where training can often support progress before mentorship if you’re having a hard time finding someone.
• What style of mentorship are you looking for?
  • Do you want an organized program that is clearly structured, with deliverables or exact timings?
    • The closest example at this time for this in Australia (or in Melbourne) is something like the SMART program, but there are mentorship programs that surface now and again from organizations similar to Girl Geek Academy, Working Lunch, Limit Break in the UK etc - programs that are organized to match you and someone else for the purposes of mentorship. This isn’t as flexible, but can increase commitment/provide a scaffolding for learning. Occasionally, there will be mentorship programs tied to specific festivals/conferences or organisations, such as GDC mentoring programs.
  • Do you want someone you can sit with in person, meaning you need to focus in on your local developer community? Do you want someone you can jump on a call with? Do you need to worry about timezones? Do you need to talk to someone face to face at all, or would Discord or e-mail suit just fine?
    • Knowing the kind of mentoring style that benefits you - whether it’s in person, calls, emails, DMs, or a mix of all of the above will help you identify who might be available to you as a mentor.
• What time commitment do you need?
  • Do you need a weekly or monthly mentor relationship?
    • Ongoing mentorship without it being a paid endeavor can be really hard for people to justify with cost of living. Having something this structured is hard to come by without a program like the above.
  • Do you want to be able to check in with someone when you need it?
    • An ad-hoc basis with someone you’ve put the effort into getting to know can be really valuable in finding pockets of career direction - it might be once a year when you see each other at events catching up over a coffee, or it might be sporadic.
  • Do you need one off advice on a specific issue?
    • This can be the easiest for a mentor to commit to - if you have a clear problem and reach out asking for some of their time, they’re unlikely to say no unless they are slammed.

The biggest question you need to ask yourself is:

• What are you trying to solve?
  • The number one issue with mentees is they don’t actually know what questions they want answered. A mentor can’t plot your career for you, tell you what you should do, or get you that one job you’re after. They’re a sounding board to call out red flags, opportunities, encourage and guide you. You need to know what it is you need from a mentor, why that mentor is the right person, before you even reach out.

Once you know the answer (or most of them) to the above, you’re ready to find a mentor. The answers above will whittle down who is a reasonable mentor for you, and you can use it as a guidepost (not unlike design pillars) for who you need. You could put the call out for what you’re after in the digest, post on social media, but you’re always going to get the best response from going directly. From there, it’s about reaching out to people politely and asking for what you need. Everyone is different in what they prefer, but reaching out via LinkedIn is fine, email is fine, even DM’s are mostly okay. Be polite if you can be clear about the what, how, when of what you need, you’re likely to get a lot further. Most seniors want to help, so the worst they can say is no. Accept if you don’t get a response - it is likely not personal!

I recommend having a suite of mentors that you can go to for different things, at different times, and mixing up whether that mentorship is in person or on calls where you can. With MIGW/SXSW coming up, now is a great time to reach out to meet up with people you admire and try to get an hour of their time with a coffee - but come prepared with questions and thoughts you want their take on.