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, business analysis or another role. Their first challenge is to escape the orbit of these old roles to be free enough to become the architect.
Architects learn by experience and from the support of other architects and IT leaders. Building the experience of a great architect takes a lifetime. 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 within a company is small. The other option is to consider commercial mentors, mentors outside of your organisation that would undertake the role for a small fee. This is a service that I offer from Dr Jon EA Ltd. 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.
Try a session today
For a limited time, the first session is free. The cost depends on the number of sessions purchased at a time.
