Overcoming the Challenges of Mentoring - Updated

• The business costs associated with corporate hiring managers inability to recruit and retain skilled workers to fill current and future entry-level positions are increasing (Queen, 2014).

• The fast pace and uncertainty of today’s economic climate have business leaders turning to mentoring as a strategy for increasing organizational knowledge sharing (Short, 2014).

• Organizational leaders reported that ineffective employee mentoring and inadequate knowledge sharing cost Fortune 500 companies over $31.5 billion per year (Shin, Picken, & Dess, 2017).

Imposter Syndrome

Factors For Effective Mentorship

• My Personal Pet Peeve!
• Learners are NOT suffering from imposter syndrome.
• Learning something new is HARD!
• Deep learning happens in a iterative process.
• Would you consider a baby learning to walk suffering from imposter syndrome.

The developer community is a overwhelmingly generous one and well-designed mentoring or apprenticeship programs could be one answer that business leaders and newbies are looking for.

Reasons Why the Development Community Needs Effective Mentoring

​Mentor:

• Understand your role:
• vocational support
• psychosocial support
• role modeling
• Evaluate your motivation
• Honest assessment of your time, talent, and temperament
• Set realistic goals
• See Example

Mentee:

• Reciprocity
• Respect for mentoring relationship
• Identified desired outcomes

• ​The industry needs to do a better job at recruiting and retaining the numbers of new developers needed to fill current and future positions.
• Newbies find it difficult to level up on their own.
• Learning to code is hard and without someone there giving you a reality check, newbies begin to feel that things are impossible and quit trying.
• Since there's no clearly defined path to becoming a programmer, a newbie's knowledge and skill set varies greatly from one individual to another.
• Positive mentoring relationships improves the mentees level of organizational engagement and participation, while lowering turnover rates.

The challenge is not in the number of newbies entering the field but the number who leave because they are not able to bridge the divide between bootcamps, online tutorials, books, videos, etc. to an employable developer who is able to contribute to the team.

What Mentoring Is...

• ​A relationship
• Personal (connection)
• A commitment
• Professionally transformational

There is an ongoing mantra within the developer community: that there are far more jobs available then programmers to fill them. Which should be an indication as to the wonderful potential for both business and those learning to code. Yet what often follows such statements are not words of joy but rather a list of frustrations related to the difficulty in finding and retaining enough skilled developers to fill these positions.

Mentorship Self-Assessment

​List 3 personal strengths and 3 personal challenges you would have if you were a mentor, mentee or both.

The 4 Quadrants of Mentoring

​​Understanding the difference between personal/professional mentoring and youth/adult mentoring.

What Mentoring is not...

Adult

Youth

• ​Mentoring adults is focused on gaining career success.
• Focused on "how do I become the best at what I do".
• Acquiring and demonstrating knowledge and skills.
• Best practice: mutually beneficial.
• Adults can be cast in role as mentor, mentee or both.

• ​One off problem solving
• Casual (maybe I will, maybe I won't)
• Static (it evolves)

• ​Mentoring youth is focused on helping young people navigate adolescence and successfully transition into adulthood.
• Focused on figuring out "who I am/who am I becoming".
• Gaining knowledge and skills.
• This could include individual and family counseling, academic support, cultural enrichment, etc. best practice: One-way focused.

This shit is hard

Personal

Professional

Lets Make A Match

• ​Professional mentoring should be seen in the same way as an apprenticeship program. With well-defined goals and objectives

• ​Personal mentoring can take on any form.
• It is unstructured and often open ended

1. Mentees please stand

2. State in ONLY 1 word what you would like help with

3. 1 Mentor to volunteer to have lunch with mentee to answer questions

Looking for a mentor?

Please move to the front.

For me, being black and female in tech is like..

For 6 months I was like a kid in candy store

Decision:

learn to code...it's easy

August 2014

Kim Crayton

Community Engineer

Credentials:

Masters of Training and Development

Doctors of Business Administration - Technology Entrepreneurship

(Successful Strategies For Increasing Organizational Knowledge Sharing)

How To Leverage Organizational Culture For Competitive Advantage

Community Engineering is the intentional and skillful effort of creating environments that support the sharing of common attitudes, interests, and goals which results in more productive, diverse, and inclusive communities.

@KimCrayton1

@CommEngReport

@InclusionSym

@InclusionConf

The process of aligning the "heart" that is community with "engineering" which requires measurable and actionable steps

Overcoming the Challenges of Mentoring

Successful mentoring doesn't just happen...it's planned.