This is Mentoring
Mentoring means that a person passes on their experience to others within a longer lasting process. In the IMC Mentoring Programme, a mentor works with one mentee at a time for a period of about 6-8 months on career entry and career guidance.
The boundaries between mentoring, consulting and coaching are fluid. Each of these types of support have specific advantages that can complement each other. This brief overview shows how these terms can be distinguished from each other and their respective benefits:
Mentoring
Personal experience serves as a guideline
Objectives: Empowerment, personal relationship
Benefit: Impact of decisions becomes tangible
Counseling
Expertise and overview
Objectives: Gain information with clear objectives
Benefit: Provides expert- and overview-knowledge
Coaching
Based on a specific methodology
Objectives: Strategic work on own goal development
Benefit: Provides effective long-term self-skills
This is how mentoring supports you
What makes mentoring so effective are 3 main factors:
- You benefit from individual experiences.
All of the job-related issues that you face will present you with a series of small and large decisions. Scientific research has shown that people are not particularly good at predicting how they will fare with the effects of a decision they make. What can lead to a better understanding of this is to ask others about their experiences with similar decisions. This level of effectiveness puts mentoring ahead of other forms of support such as counselling and coaching. - You will receive emotional support
Within a mentorship, you will have access to someone's knowledge and experience, but in addition you will also have a person at your side who is emotionally supportive of you. Thus, mentoring give you affective support: at the end of a successful mentorship, you will not only have gained knowledge, but you will also feel strengthened in your path. - Long-term process
Mentorship is a process. We recommend a period of time for a mentorship of about 6-8 months. This will result in several benefits for you: Some of your questions will only emerge during the course of the mentorship and you will be accompanied in situations as they develop. The relationship with your mentor will become more and more trusting, making your experience more profound. You will gradually be able to better assess when you can draw on the experiences of your mentor or where you should perhaps find your own way.
Your mentor
The first step for mentees is to find the right person on the alma platform who can act as a personal mentor. A 100% match between your search criteria and the profiles of the mentors is not necessary; a successful mentoring process is already possible with only a 50% match. However, you should definitely follow a few tips regarding the search, which you can find in our FAQs.
Who are the mentors?
The mentors you will find on the platform are graduates of the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences who do this work on a voluntary basis simply because they want to pass something on to you and support you.
The identity of mentors is checked through an ID upload at registration, but beyond that we rely on your help to keep up to date with the progress of your mentorship and your work with mentors. To keep in touch during your ongoing mentorship, you will receive regular automated feedback requests.
How do I find the right person for my mentorship?
It is important to think about what topics you want to work on and what questions you have before you start a mentorship. The more precise you know what your needs are in a mentorship, the better mentors can assess how they can help you.
This does not mean that you already have to have concrete goals in order to start a mentorship. Mentees bring very different needs to a mentorship. Some are still at the very beginning of their journey and need support with a basic orientation, others already know quite well where they want to go and want to work on concrete goals: The mentorship is there to provide you with the support you need!
How a Mentorship Works
Time Commitment
We recommend a period of about 6-8 months for a mentorship with meetings of about 1 ½ hours every month.
Before a mentorship, you will also need time to fill out the mentorship request in your profile.
In addition, be sure to prepare for mentorship by reading through the information on the website.
Your Role As a Mentee
As a mentee, you are responsible for the organizational processes in the mentorship, i.e. you administer the mentorship on the alma platform and take care of appointments. In short, you are responsible for ensuring that the time resources of the mentors are valued by taking over those administrative steps that are necessary to keep a mentorship going.
Recommendations for a Mentorship
To build a successful mentorship-relationship, we recommend keeping the following principles in mind:
- The experiences of mentor*s are a proposal, not a blueprint:
Mentors offer their experience and opinion on how you can handle a situation as an option: as a mentee, you make your own decisions. This also means that you need to remain independent in a mentorship and take responsibility for your progress. - Mentoring is a working relationship:
As a mentee you are in a transitional phase and this can be psychologically and emotionally stressful at times. You can and should definitely communicate stressful situations to your mentors, after all, your ressources determine the speed of the mentorship, the frequency of meetings and the scope of the topics discussed. If you are (at times) overwhelmed by the pace of the mentorship, please be sure to communicate this to your mentors instead of letting time pass without making contact!
Please remain aware of your and your mentors' role in this working relationship and try to stick to the topics that were agreed upon at the beginning of the mentorship. Personal matters may of course also be discussed in a mentorship, but this should at most contextualise the mentoring process and not take over as content. - Mentors are not Google:
Mentors answer your questions from the context of their own experiences and are not responsible for providing overview knowledge. If some of your questions cannot be answered in the mentorship, use the forum or the Mentoring Wiki on the alma platform for more information.
Also, please do not ask your mentors questions that can be answered by a simple internet search: A mentorship is meant to be an additional support and not a substitute for other opportunities available to you for your process.