Mentoring in the Workplace
 

Really interested to hear of people's experiences of this as a way to fast track interns and graduates pace of learning on the job

In my opinion it is an obligation of those that know to pass on to those that don't but want to know. I started my engineering apprenticeship in the UK at 16 and we were assigned to an old salt who taught us the ropes - invaluable and confidence inspiring. I'm now a senior exec in a pretty decent size company and I treat it as my duty to take the younger guys under my wing and not only teach them the technical skills but also the subtle social skills on how to manage up and down the organization. How to behave in meetings. When to open you mouth and when to keep it shut. I believe that it is also important to expose the younger guys to different parts of the business to enable them to have an appreciation for the role of others and potentially spark an interest in another area. My goal is to equip the guys with as much knowledge as I can before I retire. Not sure if you recall but I actually connected one of our interns with you as he was interested in composite chassis design.

I am in sales and have had many mentors who helped me to be in the top 1-3% of the companies I work for over the last 20 years. I am always glad to help others as my mentors helped me. My current employer is willing to make things work out so that the trainees get help without my commissions being damaged. Currently, the two people who have better numbers than me were mentored by me.

We (USA Dept of Energy weapons lab) don't usually hire baccalaureates "cold", but we do what we call "post-bacs" which are basically non-student grad student stints. Six - twelve months of that get both sides a good understanding of the candidate and the environment (and it pays somewhere between a grad-assistant and a junior engineer's salary). I've worked three kids through this and at least two were good "grabs"...

For us, a grad research position is the entry point. That's how I got in, a GRA doing metallurgy pursuing my MS in Metallurgical Engineering - paid for the degree, paid far better than the TAs got (so I think we know who had to pay for beer), got a clearance and slid peacefully into a few decades of the nukular-weapons-industrial-complex.

But if you're mentoring - be active! It's more than a little thing here and there, it's a job. I cannot do it anymore as I don't have the attention span but there's nothing sadder than a summer intern camped out on their phone. Props to the people that manage all of that. Especially for some of us in "interesting" places (remote/rural/etc...) it's a great tool to find those that really want to sign up and help.

I've mentored a few young'uns. I wouldn't say it's a method for fast tracking as much as for targeted training. Some of my mentees responded well some did not. It is an excellent way to develop people.

Pick me! Pick me! I'll sweep the floors for free!

In my business, a mentor is just somebody you can ask questions without being screamed at

I have had some interns. They were pretty slow...

We probably had an inferior recruiting process which gave us inferior interns.

It is a great strategy if you have the corporate culture to execute. Mine doesn't.

I basically spent 25 years of my career mentoring new inexperienced air traffic controllers. As an air traffic controller after you were a full performance level controller you were expected to always (mentor) have a developmental controller assigned to you.
The developmental controller would work on your ticket and you would have an override on his radio control transmissions for on the spot corrections. At our facility this would take about a year of daily training till the developmental either was certified or washed out.

I think the toughest part was spending a year working very closely with a developmental writing and conducting training session de-briefs on every minute spent training. Hearing stories of their asperations and family life but to know after a few months of working together that a developmental was not progressing. Tough to then have to continue to write about the develomental's training failures and start a paper trail toward justifying a developmental's training termination. Great when they succeed but the lows of failure were very tough for the developmental and the instructor too.

In racing I have had 4 mentors (some mechanics, some drivers some were both) and every mentor I choose has been an improvement.
So my racing mentors have been extremely helpful to my amateur racing and race car prep.
My current mentor was an engineer for 10 years with Richard Childress racing.
Funny I had a couple of mentors that when I would ask questions about car set up they answered honestly that "you need an engineer to find that answer".
I'm thinking then how are we running these cars with out an engineer, that would be by the seat of the pants. lol
Having an engineer as a mentor deleted 90% of the seat of the pants experience and instead increased driver and car confidence by 100%.

I spent the last half of my career mentoring junior engineers. I found it extremely satisfying and rewarding. I was fortunate, however, in that the group in which I worked never hired anyone off the streets, right out of school. One had to earn their way into that group through one's performance in other engineering groups.

Until one day, our new manager decided to roll the dice and hire a couple of fresh grads. Boy, we we all worried. We got lucky, however, and both proved to be outstanding. And they had not yet learned all of the "bad habits" from other groups, who functioned somewhat differently than ours.

So, yeah, if you have a chance to mentor, I don't think you will find a more rewarding use of your time. And it's a lot of fun. Starting with sharp young people to begin with, who are eager to learn, who have the basics is fantastic. Our mentoring was really just task-specific application more than anything else. All we had to do was show them how we did it, explain why we did it that way, and they were off to the races. Fun times.

The smartest move a young person can make
is to pick out a successful climber in the corporation,
usually at the manager level, and approach him/her
and ask politely if that person would have any tips or advice.
Cozy up and check in periodically and discuss career choices
and advancement.

The idea is to put that manager in an informal mentor position.
They'll recognize the move right away and usually go along willingly,
for them it's usually an ego thing.

Not only will the young person get guidance,
but will also gain from someone higher up
looking out for them, protecting them,
and also pushing them for advancement.

If it's a large company, the young person
can pick out two or more managers from
different departments.

Mentoring should be different than "training".

Training teaches you a job.

Mentoring should help you get your next job.

Technically correct.

c/p.
Training is an event.
Mentoring, on the other hand, is a professional development tool in which a less experienced employee seeks advice, learning, and support from a more experienced professional. Unlike training, which may be required, mentoring is an ongoing social learning relationship between two people.

According to the Business Dictionary, mentorship is defined as “an employee training system under which a senior or more experienced individual (the mentor) is assigned to act as counselor, guide, or advisor to a trainee or junior (mentee).

How would you distinguish teaching people how to do their job well vs teaching them how to advance? Part of how I measure my career success is how many people I've helped get to their 3-5 year career goals.

Mentoring is self preservation.

You do it to reduce the amount of time the newbs can make your life miserable.

The faster you can smarten them up the sooner you can get away from the fallout of their youthful exuberant ideas and actions.

Thanks for the replies, interesting to read what mentoring means to people

I've said, yes, I'm interested to a design/engineering mentoring role at a F1 team. It should be be a very rewarding role and a huge learning experience for both sides. I've done a bit of mentoring in the past but nothing that could be called a structured approach

Been asked to have a think about how I'd go about it. Have a few ideas, talked to few people from design, manufacturing and recent graduates within the team and there is a real need for it.

Opportunity is perfect timing as having just done my umpteenth new car design and build which felt a bit been there, done that and it doesn't excite me anymore. How ungrateful and spoiled does that make me sound :rolleyes:

Within the last few weeks I've started to look around for motorsport opportunities outside of F1 which might benefit from my decades of F1 design/engineering and manufacturing knowledge eg Dakar, Moto GP, LMDh, WRC :cool: All new itches I need to scratch

Think a mentoring role might just be what I need to get me over the finish line of 500 F1 races

Please keep the stories, ideas and experiences coming, its very insightful reading

...and you can teach them to stay off your darn lawn! :D

Where did you say to apply… 🙋🏽

Sent you a pm. ;)

To me, mentoring is teaching someone general principles and ask the student to analyze what they see so they can apply their own technique and style.

If you get a gig with MotoGP I'll be your gophe...er mentee!

For at least the last several years before my June 2022 retirement, I jumped on every opportunity to mentor.

*Be the listener in the meeting.

*Better to do something right than to do it fast.

*The folks who have the answers are the ones asking the questions.

That sort of thing. Hundreds of general wisdoms. Some listened, others did not. I also emphasized writing skills, which take a LONG time to truly develop. Overall, I seem to have made a difference in some peoples' lives and careers.

Coming into a 20+ year old tech stack spread across 3 or 4 languages and versions of the languages. Oh, and no/minimal documentation, badly named programs (SR1145S is "student demographics" - who knew!), bad table structure, etc.

While writing code is trivial for me (been programming since the early 80s) it took most of a year of frequent "hey, where's this and how is this supposed to work" conversations and picking stuff apart so I could write the documentation that was missing.

Also, as an instructor (linux admin, java, sql) I tend to bring teaching into all sorts of stuff, so when we get new devs with not a lot of experience I often get to spend a few hours per week with them for the first month or so...

We have a summer intern program at both the companies I am affiliated with - the North Carolina facility for composites is associated with North Car State University, excellent engineering school, and we try and get an intern from every grade that lives in the Morganton area. We also bring on at least one High School person.

They are all really bright kids and a pleasure to work with. We start them off their first summer with us on the composite line doing lay up and the basics of composutes and composite tooling They also clean up at the end of the day.

Since 80% return every summer, we give them gradually more design and CAD work that they can then manufacture.

This has been the overwhelming response: "Working lay up made me a better designer...what looks like a million bucks in CAD may be a huge pain to build unless you get the loft right etc."

On the aero side, the small company in Yorktown, we do two a summer. Generally one looking at a business or finance degree (my intern) and an aero engineer.

The aero person starts out in flight test as a helper, updating test results and test plans, maintenance, etc. If they are good by the end of the first summer they will be piloting the UAS in some regimes.

They love it. Hard to get them off the flight line:cool:

They also do janitorial work at the end of the day.

My point being is that the mentor-ships start out gaining an apprciation for how their future designs will be built and by what type of craftsman...they also get a sense of manufacturing "time" and complexity of tooling, critical components of composite manufacturing.

Lastly, we also partner with other universities on really neat projects like solar powered cars, etc. We had a ton of Appalachian State students in three summers ago and built a car shell with them. Very cool stuff.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1674916381.jpg

We also helped Duke U. with some slippery coatings:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1674916435.jpg

I know the manual labor aspect of what we do with starter Interns may sound odd, but having working many years in production environments and helicopter/UAS design management, I think it is critical that young interns get away from the "CAD Machine" and learn the trade from the perspective of the builders and assemblers. We also school them on Kaize and principles and processes and add an additional requirement: "Don't fall in love with your design..."

__________________

One other thing, which I think is an imperative with young employees, especially engineers: We mentor them on how to build slides and present their ideas, the pitch deck as it were.

We then let them brief their work to the customer, not the entire brief, just their role in the presentation. I always brief the customer in advance on what we are doing to teach our young folks. 99% of the folks we deal with are completely on board.

We also let them watch significant management meetings as a back bencher in the conference room...flip slides, take detailed notes for Minutes, etc.

The only way to get comfortable presenting complex ideas is to build, practice, rehearse and get some off-Broadway chops.

Seahawk, that's pretty impressive. Gives me some hope that my 6 month old nephew has an opportunity in a world that's at opposite poles from some other bleak assessments that others espouse.

Thank you.

Spot on!

I appreciate that, truly.

Here is a picture from five years ago in a project we were doing: A folding UAS that folds up and fits inside a wing store. All the folks in the picture are NCSU folks or in HS.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1674921847.JPG

They had a huge role in the design and fabrication work as well as flight test.

Ducted fan work my partner led (I am not an engineer and CAD, to me, is someone who breaks up with his girlfriend on Valentines Day). We are working with the Army and Navy (USMC) on this design:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1674922083.jpg

I was very lucky as a young Naval Officer getting the right mentoring, both frmal and informal. I think it is huge part of company (including the military) success.

I’m more in the blue collar world but to be a good UPS driver whether it be delivery or long haul like myself, I believe mentoring by an experienced, proven driver is extremely necessary. Our supervisors are not day in day out tested drivers. They see everything on paper not real world. Unfortunately UPS is going away from this type of training and the service level shows.

A good mentor is "candid" without being threatening.......

Reason being; pointing out when someone gets "something right" is very easy..........

Getting a protege to see what they did wrong and learn from that mistake is a lot more challenging.

The ongoing, subliminal, underlying lessons are always: ethics, high personal standards of honesty, the value of focus, hard work and delayed satisfaction, some self depreciation and of course real humility...........

So, in the final analysis, be careful who you choose to mentor, not all candidates are worthy students.......... in fact most ARE NOT.

Great post - all of it, but especially the above. We get some clinkers but we are polite and respectful and let them ease out the door without drama.

We also do interview and it can be eye-opening. I had an interview with a young man I thought was going to be perfect for some detailed spreadsheet work we had last summer building a proposal: cost schedule, hours the whole deal. My goal was to get him up to speed and do course corrections with him. I build these things in my sleep. Easy day.

Great resume, grades, William and Mary business track, etc.

He shows up on time with his Mom. I introduce myself, and ask if I can get Mrs. X anything while her son and I talk.

"That won't be necessary...we'll both meet with you."

He is looking at his phone and Mrs. X looks like a long day at the Mall, but I can't help myself.

"Alright. We'll use the conference room."

Our full time young engineers are really something: We just unfortunately lost a PhD candidate in Aero to the Army. She is from a small ranch in Wyoming and right out of central "couldn't be a better young woman" central casting. We just couldn't compete with the GS perks the Army offered, oddly enough after she and I briefed the Army on the canister launched UAS that grew out of the earlier picture I posted. Oh, well.

Her design improvements after we flew the original design in some Navy Experiments was nothing short of fantastic. Amazing stuff. I have dinner with she and her husband once a month or so and she is flourishing, duh, and is happy.

She is one example of six high speed, low drag under 30 engineers working for us.

I write that because I had never really encountered a helicopter Mom until then.

What a performance.

Neither of them got the internship:cool:

This is where you say "Unless you're planning on working alongside him every day, you won't be present."

Hopefully the poor kid was mortified and realized that was a red flag.

Sooooo, kid and mom had a bse or higher? How old was the kid?

Me: "No you won't."

Next!

I was kidding about the Mom.

The same thing happened a few years before at the place in North Carolina. I was not there. My partner did the, "not going to happen" and a fur ball ensued with an upset Mom.

We decided to humor the parents and not hire the kid(s) should it happen again; just not worth it the potential bravo sierra for a five minute "how-do-you-do and have a nice day...we'll call" meeting

Sorry for the hi-jack Capt...good luck!

So if I take on the mentoring role I should bring my mom with me :D

Paul inspiring stuff, wouldn't have expected anything less from you

Someone mentioned sitting in management meetings, I'd thought of that so good to see I'm not the only one thinking that way

One more: The young man on the left, running the safety tether, was an intern. He is now full time. He works remote two days a week.

The other guy is my partner. We are testing a tethered version of what we call Watchman...all data and power go up the tether so it can fly as long as the customer wants and be launched and recovered via the tether system.

<iframe width="1472" height="828" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Nd243HOdzw4" title="Watchman Tether Test 2023 01 30 1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Thanks again for taking time to post your comments

I've a meeting tomorrow to discuss my approach on how best to go about mentoring

Rightly or wrongly I've not prepared any spreadsheets, PowerPoint, Venn diagrams etc

Just going to let my passion for nurturing young engineers and my willingness to share my knowledge/experience do the talking.

A longtime friend and 35yr F1 design veteran and myself both agree on the same approach. It's a bit old school but from our experiences works well

Give mentored engineers design work that is beyond their ability. Allow them to make mistakes drown a little chose the wrong approach but always be there to point them back to the right path

At the same time introduce them to the right people to talk to so they create company wide healthy working relationships that help all parties.

Also give them 1st hand experience of seeing their hard work being manufactured, built and tested while fully understanding how their good work/mistakes impacts the rest of the team's

Hoping if I find the right approach I should help nurture the next generation of young engineers that never give up, push time, materials, manufacturing processes, to the limits with a never satisfied its good enough attitude while thoroughly enjoying what they do for most of the time

Thought I'd post a long over due update

Disappointingly the above meeting led to nothing despite my best efforts, the intent was there but when it came to the crunch there just wasn't the support required to do it properly

Not all is lost though as this week I've agreed to join another F1 team who approached me out of the blue about building up, training and mentoring a newly created small group of design engineers in preparation of being fully race ready for the new 2nd generation hybrid power unit era starting in 2026

As this time it has the full backing and support from the head honcho and down I'm feeling very optimistic the team is serious about the importance of a well structured mentoring programme

Really fired up, can't wait to start, excited but scared in equal measure.

I'm my happiest, pushing motorsport design/engineering to the limit and often beyond my comfort zone

Only this time I'll have a few frightened, newbies strapped in riding shotgun with me, should be a fun and exciting ride :D

Mentoring a rookie HV Electrician while working their 1st time on a hot 12 or 66Kv circuit up a pole in a bucket is always fun when you ask them if they feel all their arm hair standing on end through their HV gloves.
Think twice, move as trained and trust your safety gear.
I heard it from my mentor @ my 1st time and I automatically repeated the same exact words like it was yesterday. Made me smile.
Lineman B will some day do the same some day as a Lineman A and that's how the baton gets passed along IBEW style. Only God and Electricians can make light.