What is Mentoring?

Mentoring is a collaborative learning relationship with a focus on personal growth and career guidance. However, this relationship is different what one might have with a manager or team lead in the sense that it is more personal and focuses on the individual, rather than on how the individual might contribute to business goals. Although the mentee typically sets the goals and milestones they'd like to achieve, that's not to say that the mentor cannot set their own personal development goals for the mentoring relationship.

Different Types of Mentoring

One-on-One Mentoring 🤝

This type of mentoring involves only one mentor and one mentee. In one-on-one mentoring, a more experienced senior is paired with, and provides guidance to, someone who has less experience. At the moment, this guide is tailored specifically for one-to-one mentoring. However, if you have any resources on the other types of mentoring mentioned below, please create a pull request to add them to the Community Resources folder in the GitHub repo. 🙏

Group Mentoring 📣

In group mentoring, one or several mentors work together to provide guidance to a group of mentees. This type of mentoring is particularly good for when mentees are feeling alone in their struggles. It is also a good type of mentoring to implement in cases where time or resources are scarce and assigning a mentor to each mentee is not possible.

Peer Mentoring 👥

In the case of peer mentoring, the mentor and mentee are on a similar level in terms of experience. Unlike other types of mentoring where the mentor is the one providing guidance to the mentee, this type of mentoring involves peers offering support to one another. Peer mentoring can occur as a one-on-one mentoring relationship, or as group mentoring.

Reverse Mentoring ⏮

In this type of mentoring, a junior mentors someone more senior. The idea with reverse mentoring is that the more junior professional may be able to teach someone more senior new skills and new technologies.