How to become a Mentor? Requirements, competencies, Mentor development path.

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Being a Mentor is one career path that potentially opens up at a certain stage of one’s career. Many people decide precisely to follow this path in response to professional burnout, discouragement with corporate work, or simply a desire to share their achievements with others. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at this topic, including from my own perspective, and show what it takes to become a Mentor and how to go about it in general.

Mentoring as one of the stages of professional development

To begin with a brief personal feature to give background for the rest of the article. I myself am not a professional Mentor with many years of experience. I started relatively recently – a few years ago, then somehow accelerated the acquisition of knowledge and experience through the co-creation of Mentiway – a platform for the implementation of mentoring programs.

However, because I have this fresh layman’s perspective I am able to understand the needs of beginners in this industry and provide you with practical advice on how to get started and what to look out for.

In the course of building the product and later the Mentiway brand, I also noticed that mentoring from a Mentor’s perspective is, as I mentioned in the introduction, a kind of springboard or even an alternative career path further down the line. During this time, I met, on the one hand, Mentors and Mentors who see mentoring as an opportunity to stop, take a break from their daily work, reflect on their own development and look for additional motivators for their work. On the other hand, I have met people for whom mentoring has become a full-time occupation, who, tired, burned out by corporate work, looking for more peace and quiet and other stimuli in their professional lives, have decided to professionalize in this field and are already engaged in this only by offering their services both commercially – for companies, and pro bono as part of their work with foundations.

Whatever your path is, know that being a Mentor gives a lot of satisfaction. There is something for everyone – it can be simply the motivation from helping others, meeting new people, a conversation arising from the need for partnership, establishing a relationship, or the competitive desire to achieve goals no longer as myself, but as someone else I will guide and accompany.

What is the role and competencies of the Mentor?

If you’re planning to go the Mentor route, you’re probably also wondering if you have the right competencies to effectively fulfill this role.

Both about the competencies themselves and about the role of the Mentor I have already written in a previous article – I invite you to read it in full. Here I just include a brief summary.

To understand the competencies needed, it is first necessary to understand the Mentor’s role in mentoring processes.

The Mentor’s role is primarily:

• Companionship – that is, being in partnership with the Mentee and accompanying him/her in their development.
• Support – helping you broaden your perspective, learn about your capabilities and motivations.
• Active listening and questioning – giving the Mentee space to speak, but also inspiring her to think and deepen her statements with relevant questions.
• Drawing lessons and sharing them -presenting a different perspective based on what the Mentee shares with the Mentor, giving feedback.
• Sharing one’s own knowledge and experience – building on and sharing previous experience, although usually without advising or pushing one’s own solutions.

As you can see, the Mentor role consists of two main pillars:

• Coaching workshop – that is, all about inspiration, accompaniment, asking questions, refraining from giving advice.
• Domain knowledge and experience – that is, that which is related to the areas in which Mentee wants to develop.

Therefore, what competencies should a Mentor/Mentee have?

Precisely related to these two areas. That is, on the one hand, the Mentor must have knowledge and experience gained through years of previous work. This experience must coincide with the Mentee’s needs or with the objectives of a particular mentoring program.

On the other hand, the Mentor/Mentee must have, but also polish the coaching workshop over time, among other things:

• The desire to help others,
• The ability to set goals for themselves and others,
• communication skills,
• active listening,
• asking questions,
• providing feedback,
• Knowledge of and ability to use mentoring and coaching techniques.

At the beginning of his journey, the Mentor should have at least basic skills in the above-mentioned area, which can be supported, for example, by experience in a managerial or leadership position.

How to become a Mentor?

In my opinion, there are two main paths you can follow if you want to try your hand as a Mentor, plus an additional training option, which will be discussed further on.

Open mentoring programs

The first path is to join one of the many mentoring programs already open today. These are initiatives by foundations, professional organizations and universities to support their missions. Programs of this type complement the other forms of development offered by these organizations. They most often take place periodically – every year and last 6-9 months each. There is a lot to choose from.

Here it is also worth mentioning that these types of programs are very often geared towards novice Mentors. We know from experience that up to half of the participants have no prior experience in mentoring. Therefore, very often these programs offer training to introduce novice Mentors to their roles and tasks.

Start a mentoring program in your company

A second path may be to launch or suggest to the HR / L&D team to organize a mentoring program in the company where you work. Mentoring is becoming increasingly popular. According to our 2023 study, 23% of companies use mentoring in the development of their employees, compared to only 6% 10 years ago. In addition, as many as 44% of HR representatives would like to implement mentoring at their company. However, additional motivation and grassroots initiative are still needed.

And even if organizing an extensive program is not possible at your company, you can open yourself up to informal mentoring simply by communicating to other employees that you would be happy to become a Mentor.

Keep in mind, however, that for mentoring to be effective and meet its objectives, your Mentee must not be your subordinate. And ideally, you and your Mentee should have no current project/relationship threads at work.

If your company has no mentoring experience, then contact us. We have designed our Mentiway platform to guide participants through the entire mentoring process also introducing inexperienced individuals to specific issues, areas and techniques.

Mentoring trainings

Finally, there is one more implementation area, which I will use to smoothly professionalize Mentor’s work in a moment. It is about mentoring training. There are many training products available on the market, introducing potential Mentors to the world of mentoring. Of course, if you have the need, it is worth taking advantage of them.

However, my opinion is that the most important thing in mentoring is experience and knowledge in the mentored field, as well as some leadership skills. You’ll learn the rest in your first mentoring programs, or in the accreditation track.

Mentors’ individual accreditations

Now we smoothly move on to the topic of accreditation – that is, obtaining “certificates” confirming the knowledge and experience of the Mentor and the quality of their mentoring processes.

Accreditations are useful for two reasons:

• Allow you to systematize your knowledge about mentoring and further polish your skills in this field,
• Prove to potential clients the fact that you present the required quality in mentoring – this comes in handy most often when conducting mentoring processes on behalf of companies.

In Europe, the EMCC (European Mentorign and Coaching Council) is the most popular in this field. Admittedly, there is also a second organization: the ICF (International Coach Federation), but this one focuses only on coaching.

There are four levels of accreditation available from EMCC. Each has its own requirements and each proves a different level of experience. To begin with, however, the first level, Mentor Foundation, will probably suffice.

In order to obtain this accreditation, at this point it is necessary to have confirmed Mentor Foundation training and prove experience in at least 5 processes with min. 50 hours of mentoring sessions in at least 1 year.

Here is a complete list of individual accreditation levels: https://emccpoland.org/akredytacja/akredytacja-indywidualna-coacha/

Prepare for mentor accreditation

Remember, too, that if you’re planning an accreditation of this type in the future, it’s a good idea to start collecting documentation from your mentoring processes now. This includes, but is not limited to:

• hours held, dates of mentoring meetings,
• their own self-reflections from individual sessions and entire processes,
• Feedback from Mentees.

What’s next?

Hopefully, you already know what the role of Mentor is , how to get started and the opportunities for further development. It is now worth translating intentions into concrete actions:

1. Get basic knowledge about mentoring, read our articles:

• Who is a Mentor
• What is mentoring

2. Start your first process by remembering to consciously participate in the process, in terms of

• documenting individual meetings in terms of dates, times, topics of each session,
• ongoing self-reflections and conclusions from meetings,
• get the first feedback from the Mentees you will accompany.