Your Mentoring Era: Are You Ready For It?
Mentoring can be daunting and seems like something someone else does. No one just becomes a mentor, it’s a skill like any other part of your career. This means that anyone can be a mentor with the right support.
Why Become a Mentor?
Mentoring is a powerful tool for your own professional and personal development, and an opportunity to give back to the next generation. Our impact reports show that mentoring helps people to:
Grow their leadership skills
Improve their listening skills
Help them deliver feedback in a more useful way
Improve communication abilities
Renew enthusiasm for their work
“84% of our mentors reported improvements to their listening skills in 2023.”
Being a Great Mentor
Lots of people are hesitant about becoming mentors. People can often be unsure on what they have to offer, or don’t feel they are senior enough to take on a role like this. But more often than not, they are perfect to mentor.
You can see if you’re ready to mentor by asking yourself a few questions:
Do you have experience that could be used to help someone else?
Could your network be valuable to someone?
Would you like to support junior talent?
Would you be interested in getting a new perspective on your industry?
Are you interested in growing in your role?
If you answered yes to the above, then you have the basics needed to mentor. You don't already need to be a manager to mentor, as we support you through the process with training to give you everything you need.
““The training was very effective for me. I have never mentored before and I feel I learned a lot and it was interesting and beneficial to acquire these new skills.””
The Importance of Trained Mentors
While informal mentoring relationships can be valuable, formal programmes with trained mentors often yield better results.
Organizations that provide specific skills training for their mentors are more than four times as likely to report having a higher percentage of effective mentors. Source: LHH
Trained mentors are typically more effective because they:
Understand the structure and goals of mentoring programs
Have learned specific techniques for guiding and supporting mentees
Are better equipped to handle challenging situations
Can set and maintain appropriate boundaries
Our programmes are designed to help professionals in the creative industry become effective and inclusive mentors.
“I found the process incredibly helpful to be able to start those development conversations. I switched away from acting like a teacher and having one way conversations, and used the coaching and listening skills that I found were much more effective with my mentee, and then in my job.”
As a charity, we support 16-25 year olds from lower socioeconomic backgrounds looking to begin or develop their creative careers. Because of this the first part of our training specifically focuses on understanding the barriers that the young people in our community face, and providing our mentors with the knowledge so they can mentor inclusively.
The Impact of Mentoring with Creative Mentor Network
We’ve been running mentoring training programmes for 10 years now, and the outputs we’ve seen from our programmes have been incredible.
Not only do people finish our programmes as mentors, but they do so having made a connection and professional relationship with the future of the creative industries.
As we actively work to increase class diversity in the creative industries, the young people we match our mentors with are given someone to listen to their ideas, provide them with guidance, expand their networks and grow their confidence.
Become a Mentor
Mentoring is a significant step in any professional journey, whatever side of the relationship you are on. But to have the greatest impact, it’s important to approach it with the right support so you can do the best job. Mentors have mentors too.
Applications are currently open for the next cohort of our mentor training programme Break the Wall. Learn more about it and begin your mentoring era with us: https://www.creativementornetwork.org/break-the-wall
