Getting a Mentor: Your Next Critical Career Move

1
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical
Career Move

• Federally Employed Women
• Mid-Continent Regional Training Program
• October 5, 2007
• Osage Beach, MO
• Presented by Ms. Arlena Fitch-Gordon
• VP for Training

2
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical
Career Move

• Let us define Mentoring
• There are many definitions for the word
  mentoring!
• I will define mentoring as an experienced
  person acting to enhance a persons skills and
  intellectual development by serving as a
  sponsor and using his or her influence to aide
  that person.
• Mentoring is more about reaching individual
  goals than organizational goals.

3
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical Career
Move

• The mentor has achieved career success,
  acquired self- confidence and wishes to share
  his or her experience with a less experienced
  member.
• A good mentor is anyone you can learn from.
  You dont have to have a lot in common.
  Mentoring can be in groups. Everyone needs
  mentors. Being a mentor is good for the
  mentors career too.

4
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical Career
Move

• Mentors help women advance in organizations by
  building self-confidence and providing career
  guidance and direction, insight on
  organization policies and job search
  strategies.
• Most importantly, a mentor can help women
  overcome gender related obstacles and play a
  vital role in providing growth opportunities
  and visibility within the organization.

5
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical Career
Move

• Today, mentoring is all inclusive, it is a
  multi-focal process that includes
• training
• advice
• emotional support
• advocacy
• performing developmental roles
• assisting the mentee to obtain positions or
  facilitating the mentees upward mobility in
  the professional world. The mentor assumes
  the role of both teacher and advocate for the
  mentee, using his or her knowledge to guide or
  shape the mentees development.

6
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical Career
Move

• Mentoring means providing, in a supportive
  non- threatening way, advice, counsel,
  insight, and facts that the less experienced
  person can use to guide his or her development
  into a seasoned professional.
• This instills diversity in our ranks, promotes
  equal opportunity, and instills camaraderie
  and unity in the American workforce, where we
  all win.
• A mentoring program is a critical part of any
  workforce development initiative. You must
  have programs and strategies in place to
  continually update the skills and competencies
  of your associates.

7
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical Career
Move

• Mentoring is one of the means to pass on that
  corporate knowledge and to expand the skills
  of associates.
• The importance of having a mentor will play a
  pivotal role in helping you get where you
  want to go.
• The mentor helps unlock the potential of the
  mentee through the process of nurturing
  potential growth. It is through growth that
  we discover our own greatness and the
  greatness of others.

8
Getting a Mentor Your Next Critical Career
Move

• Mentors are active participants in the
  planting, nurturing and harvesting of
  unlimited human potential.
• As mentors, it is our job as current federal
  employees to pass along the wealth of
  knowledge, skills, expertise and values to
  the next generation of federal employees.
• Building relationships is clearly a two-way
  street. But sometimes, new mentors and their
  mentees struggle to get acquainted.
• It is the role of the mentor to get the mentee
  to talk and to trust.

9
A Sound Mentoring Program

• A sound mentoring program should cover several
  basic aspects
• What type of mentor is best suited for you?
• What type of mentor are you?
• How to identify and select a mentor.
• How to identify and select a mentee.
• Benefits of having a mentor.
• Benefits of being a mentor.
• How to set up a mentoring program in your
  organization.
• Benefits to the organization.