Mentoring is a catalyst for developing professional skills and careers. They accelerate the development of your career through wider experience and viewpoints. For the IT and Enterprise Architect, they are even more important, due to the breadth and lack of process structure of the role.
What is mentoring?
Mentoring is a professional relationship between two people, mentor and mentee, with the goal of professional development for the mentee. The mentor is an experienced individual who can share knowledge, skills, experience and advice with the mentee. Helping the mentee see issues and situations from different perspectives. The mentoring relationship is one built on trust and separate from line management or company performance management. In this way, mentoring is a confidential and safe space to explore and develop.
Mentoring is hugely beneficial to IT and Enterprise Architects because of their career paths. One does not normally start a career as an architect directly from college but instead comes from a background in another role. Architects have normally been experienced in infrastructure design, software development, analytics or business analysis. Their first challenge is to escape the orbit of these old roles to be free enough to become the architect.
There is no conversion course to become an architect, though lots of skill training on parts of the job are available. The breadth of the role, and the lack of process, make putting these skills together complex. Architects learn by experience and from the support of other architects and IT leaders. Building the experience of a great architect takes a lifetime. I think this can be accelerated through mentoring. Through the mentor relationship, we can tap into a wider experience set to learn from. More than just the point advice we might get from our peers through architecture review boards or peer review.
Finding a mentor
Finding a mentor is not always easy. You need a relationship that is separate from line management or the politics of the work environment. A mentor that you can trust to be open and honest. A mentor that gives you confidence and with who you have rapport.
The pool of architects to pick from as a mentor in some companies can be very small, creating a challenge. For some areas of the role, I’ve successfully used mentors outside of the architecture discipline, for example in stakeholder management and to help me get closer to specific groups of resistant stakeholders. The other option is to consider commercial mentors, mentors outside of your organisation that would undertake the role for a small fee. There are a number of small companies offering this as a service, including my own. With funding options from your company direct, expensed or from your own personal development budget.
My approach to mentoring
Mentoring is a transient relationship to enable the mentee to develop. It may only be one session, though often it is a number of regular conversations to support the mentee. I find a one-hour video conversation to work well for this. Post-Covid we have all become so much more comfortable with video conferencing.
I try to focus a mentoring session on a specific question or issue. Ideally, this is shared before the session to allow the session to be about exploring together. After the session, I normally provide some further reading and pointers by email. Then providing a degree of email support between the sessions.
Summary
For IT and Enterprise Architects mentoring is a way to accelerate the development of skills and experience. Often architect mentors can be difficult to find within organisations due to the small size of the architect team. In such situations, commercial mentors are an option to consider.
Take a look at my mentoring service page for more on my approach.
