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Are you about to start your journey as a mentee? Getting guidance and career advice from someone who has transitioned your path and dealt with its ups and downs is the best way to propel and unlock your professional progress. And since you’re meeting for the first time, it’s important to have a clear idea of how to properly prepare your mentoring session and the best questions to ask a mentor.
Before diving into some career advice questions to ask a mentor, make sure you have everything ready for the meeting. It goes beyond knowing what things to ask a mentor. It’s about setting the ground and doing all the prep to get the most out of your mentor-mentee relationship. Get a head start for your interview by following these tips.
Setting goals is key when it comes to finding the best question to ask your mentor and getting the most out of your meeting with them. Start by establishing the goals for each mentoring session, then set the objective for your whole development process; that way, you’ll tailor your career path questions and share your growth plan with your mentor more easily.
Define your development objectives by prioritizing SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). This will allow you to focus your efforts on each of these career advice sessions and ease your mentor’s job in tracking and assessing your progress.
Getting the most out of your mentoring session implies evaluating and defining in advance the topics you’d like to discuss for each session. Your mentorship questions should focus on your overall career development and its stages, as well as the objectives, results, or skills you’ll address each session.
If you’re following up on any progress, assignments, or lessons from previous mentoring sessions, then make sure to cover any doubts or next steps in your list of questions to ask your mentor. Other career advice topics and questions you could tackle during your mentorships are self-improvement and building skills, situational, business, and leadership advice, or just storytelling about your and your mentor’s experiences.
Mentoring sessions are about productivity and growth. The questions you must ask your mentor won’t be the only thing to discuss. You should also be prepared for the topics they have in mind to check on your progress; in fact, they’ll have questions to discover your objectives and challenges, as well as find out what’s the best way to use their skills and experience to help you.
Among the topics your mentor will likely address, there will certainly be room for questions to circle back to on your progress and evaluate how you follow their advice. This means you must make yourself accountable before, during, and after your mentoring sessions. Have a clear overview of any advice you’d like to know to improve your method or overcome a challenge.
Your first career advice sessions will be less fluent because you and your mentor will have just met each other. Nevertheless, you should always keep the conversations straightforward and clear. Of course, small talk every now and then works to improve the rapport, but don’t force conversations.
Remember your mentor is taking time out of their day to meet with you, so be respectful and thorough with their time. Make sure to prepare your mentorship questions for each session in advance and have all your assignments ready.
As mentioned above, listing your concerns is vital when crafting your questions to ask a mentor. Once you’ve established your topics of interest, you should write your questions and organize them by pillars. Aside from clearing your doubts, classifying your mentorship questions will boost the conversion, making it more fluent.
If you’re still figuring out how to categorize your mentor interview questions, here are a few mentoring session topics you can use to get a head start:
If you’re still tailoring your list of questions to ask a mentor, check out this boilerplate selection. Remember to adapt them to your needs, keep them specific and straightforward, as well as contextualize them to allow your mentor to understand your case and provide more meaningful answers.
Here are gpac’s 30 best questions to ask your mentor, classified by categories for getting the most out of your mentee experience.
Now that you have a clearer overview of which topics you should approach in your mentoring session and some questions to ask your mentor, make sure to get the best out of every meeting and apply every career advice you’ll get.
Contributed by Luis Arellano
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