The Role Of The Mentor

You will be asked to mentor a second-year student for a six-month period from November to April.

You will be asked to have five meetings with your mentee throughout the six months, each would be approximately 1 hour duration. 

In addition, we would ask you to arrange a work shadow day, whereby you bring your student into your workplace for a day, and they can meet with various people, e.g. HR, IT and perhaps some people working in areas of interest to your student. The meetings should be set up in advance with your colleagues. If you are not in a position to host a student in your workplace, that is not an issue, you may offer some alternatives.

Perhaps you may be able to consider some other way to help them career wise – e.g. speaking to some colleagues over a zoom meeting in an area of interest to the student, or you may see if another mentor could host them.

Not at all, you can ‘meet’ over Zoom, MSTeams etc. or indeed even over the phone. The main thing is that you are prepared for each encounter with your student. If they have asked questions when they requested the meeting, you should ensure that you devote some time to discussing the answers with them.

Please do remember that your student is very inexperienced and may not even know what it is that they need from you. The best way to see how best you can help them is to talk it through with them, their e-portfolio may be a good place to start.

We have a number of resources to help you with that. The first meeting is really about getting to know your mentee, discussing their career ambitions and prospects, perhaps sharing a little about your career journey to date.

At this first meeting you should also set some ground rules, what they can expect from you and what you expect from them – e.g. if they email you when can they generally expect a response; how you would like them to contact you; how much notice you’d need to set up a meeting, etc.  

It is likely that out of that conversation, you will see where you can help them. Do remember, that even though you may not be experienced as a mentor, you will have a lot to offer the student.