![]() ![]() You’ll need to assign practice coding projects from which the mentee can learn. Unlike other professions, mentoring software developers requires more than just giving advice. You need to be an attentive listener, and you need to have enough practical experience to be able to give your mentee the right advice at the right time. So while there’s an element of teaching to mentorship, the skills a mentor needs are different to those of a teacher. It’s not the job of a mentor to teach, although you might end up doing a little bit of that. It shouldn’t take up much of your time–no more than a couple of hours each week. Most mentors are not mentoring full-time: they have their own jobs and mentoring is something they do in their spare hours, because they want to help others, and they almost always do it for free. Mentoring is so important because it enables deliberate learning: it stops people falling into the ‘repeated year’ trap.Īll you need to be a mentor is a skillset that someone else wants to learn. That’s why we have the old adage, “ they might have 10 years’ experience, but it’s just 1 year repeated 10 times.” While incidental learning is still learning, you’ll ‘level up’ at a very slow pace compared to deliberate learning. Deliberate learning means working towards a specific goal, and that goal is generally much larger in scope than the scattergun approach that you adopt when working through your daily tasks. Unfortunately this is not deliberate learning. I say ‘stop learning’ but of course most developers are learning each day, perhaps via StackOverflow or blog posts like this one. Many people effectively stop learning once they land their first job. ![]() The prevailing attitude for professional software developers seems to be that you go to college and study for three years, and come out the other side knowing everything there is to know about building software. That’s a shame because mentoring can be crucial to levelling-up as a software developer. In the majority of places that I’ve worked, mentoring was either underused or non-existent. Mentoring is the practice of assisting people with their learning and career growth over a long period of time.Īlthough it’s a well-established practice, it’s not so common in the tech industry. ![]()
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