1. Mentoring.
Mentoring involves guiding people through a particular transition process by someone who has been through the same process before and can provide support through their own experience. Mentoring should be a longer-term commitment to be effective, because for mentees it is primarily about reflecting on desires and goals, recognizing the spaces have to maneuver in and being strengthened through a mentor's accompaniment.
1.1 Basics
In a mentorship, you convey your expertise and the story of your personal career path on the one hand, but at the same time it is important to be able to abstract from this what seems relevant and appropriate for your mentee with regard to their individual personality.
Question the mentee's goals critically for achievability, but also remain open to their wishes and ideas. Offer your opinion on how to handle a situation as one option and leave the decision up to the mentee.
In addition to your knowledge and personal experience, it is quite essential for mentees to experience encouragement, motivation and strengthening of their own initiative through you. Encourage mentees to try out things, not to wait for opportunities to arise on their own, but to be proactive and create opportunities for themselves. Help with decisions, but leave the responsibility of choice up to the mentee.
1.2 Boundaries of Mentoring
Mentoring / Coaching / Counselling
Mentoring is not counselling in which experts impart knowledge, but offers personal experience values as guidelines for one's own actions. Mentoring is also not coaching, in which experts develop processes, but offers the opportunity to develop one's own process through reflection and exchange with more experienced people.
However, the boundaries between mentoring, consulting and coaching are often fluid. So, if you have experience in coaching and/or consulting, you may of course incorporate this into a mentorship, but you should always keep your own boundaries in mind: You are volunteering as a mentor and should not start to develop a feeling that you are performing work that in another context you would be getting paid for.
Entrepreneurship-mentoring
Particularily in the area of mentoring people for self-employment, entrepreneurship and/or business start-ups, mentees sometimes have the expectation to get support that resembles more something like business counselling then what mentorship fundamentally is. These may be questions about the viability of start-up ideas or tax concerns. In these cases, guide your mentee to research information themselves. Mentees will find contacts to a variety of institutions that offer advice, training and funding for founders on the alma platform.
Further boundaries in a mentorship
- Keep in mind that you are not taking on a "career guarantee" . It is not the task of mentors to provide mentees with a job or job contacts.
- Do not provide academic support for mentees who are in the final stages of their studies. Students have University-supervisors for this purpose.
- Do not provide therapeutic "life counseling". This does not mean that personal matters should not have a place in your mentorship, but always try to remain aware of your role and set your boundaries if necessary.
Please also keep in mind that the desire to support mentees beyond the agreed-upon, professional issues does not necessarily arise at the mentee's request. You are in a supportive role and will develop a personal relationship with your mentee over a period of time, so you may not yourself immediately perceive that boundaries are being overstepped, as you might experience a strong willingness to help. However, you always have the opportunity to steer the mentorship relationship back on track as agreed upon, even if boundaries were not so clear in a previous meeting. Please also note that you can always contact the alma mentoring team should any problems arise.
2. Your role as a mentor
Mentors make themselves available to mentees as contacts and need to set boundaries at the beginning of a mentorship as to which form(s) of communication should take place. Please do not hesitate to state your wishes for the mentorship right at the beginning - we will prepare the mentees accordingly as to what their own role in a mentorship entails.
Communicate clearly, for example, which frequency and which types of communication between meetings are okay for you. Are mentees allowed to contact you between meetings with urgent questions, such as upcoming job interviews or when they need to make time-sensitive decisions? Do you prefer to be contacted by email, phone, or text messages?
Although mentees usually start the process with a focus on gaining information, we know from our years of experience that a successful mentorship for mentees arises primyourarily from feeling supported by you. Your task as a mentor is above all to strengthen your mentee, to open up room for reflection in your meetings and to broaden your mentee's horizons. A mentorship-meeting should always provide an opportunity for mentees to take a deep breath and organize their thoughts.
For you this also means, that you do not have to worry about perhaps not having sufficient knowledge or too little experience for the role as a mentor. Mentees should definitely be empowered in mentorship to research information themselves and stay active throughout the process.
During a mentorship, keep in mind your role:
Mentoring is a working relationship:
Mentees may go through stressful periods and will in all likelihood communicate this to you - after all, you are a confidant. Remain aware of your role in the mentorship and, if necessary, counteract in good time if topics other than those agreed to at the beginning of the mentorship take up too much space.
We recommend that, if you have this opportunity, you hold personal mentorship-meetings in work premises. For one this underlines the character of the working relationship, but it also provides a better opportunity to discus confidential topics than, for example, if you meet in public spaces such as a café.
You are in a hierarchically structured relationship:
You are ahead of the mentees in your experience and mostly also in terms of age. For this very reason, it is important that you encourage mentees to make their own decisions and to actively go their own way. In doing so, you prevent the development of a dependency-relationship in your mentee. Even if this is not a likely path that your mentorship will take, you should remain aware of this immanent hierarchy within a mentorship.
Implicit desire for network building through mentorship:
Many mentees have a strong awareness that they need to build a professional network. You as a mentor will - at least for the defined period of the mentorship - be part of this network.
At the same time you bring your own professional network to the table and for your mentee it might of course be desirable to gain access to it. You have no obligation to open up your personal professional network to your mentee. It is best to think about where you want to draw your lines in this regards to this before you start a mentorship.
Mentees receive for additional information and support from the alma team to build their own professional network - i.e. in the context of special workshops for mentees that we offer.
A question we are often asked is whether mentors and mentees should be on first-name terms with each other. This is of course up to you and depends on what you feel more comfortable with.
We recommend, however, to address each other, at least at the beginning of a mentorship, on a last-name-basis. Your mentorship is a hierarchically-gradated working relationship and the familiarity evoked by being on a first-name basis can blur the boundaries of that situation. When the processes and contents of your mentorship have become settled after the first couple of meetings and you feel it is appropriate, you can then still offer to be on first-name terms.
3. alma Mentees
alma mentees are students and graduates of the University of Vienna who are looking for support with:
- career orientation and career entry
- starting a business and becoming self-employed
- working abroad
3.1 Who are the alma Mentees?
The target group for alma Mentoring is very heterogeneous: Mentees come from all fields of study and are at completely different points in their career paths. Some mentees are looking for orientation and need to develop their goals first, others have concrete ideas and need support on a path they have already planned.
You can specify in your mentor profile in which areas you offer support and with which type of mentorship you feel comfortable.
3.2 What questions and expectations do mentees bring with them?
Due to the heterogeneous target group, we can only give a rough overview of mentees' questions and expectations. However, in their mentorship-request mentees will tell you in which situation they find themselves currently, what professional goals they have and what support they hope to receive from you. As a mentor, you can consider with each mentorship-request whether your knowledge and experience will fit with the wishes and ideas of each mentee.
4. Common topics in mentoring
4.1 Career orientation and career entry
- Learn about career orientation/career fields and own interests
- Learn to assess own skills
- Get insight into specific career paths
- Better understand job-application processes
- Make professional contacts, establish or expand a professional network
- Develop a concrete career goal
- Reconciling family-life and specific career fields
- Labor law issues (i.g. work-contracts)
- Salary negotiation, salary level
4.2 Self-employment and start-up
- Work-life balance in self-employment
- Stress management strategies
- Career networks for self-employed professionals
- Gaps between expectations for self-employment and reality
- Stages in the process towards self-employment
4.3 Working abroad
- Job hunting abroad
- Housing abroad
- Labor law differences
- Cultural differences
- Adequate pay
- Insurance plans
- Building professional or social networks
5. Support
Please do not hesitate to contact the alma mentoring team should any difficulties, unpleasant situations or questions to be clarified arise during the mentoring process. We will try to be available and support you to the best of our abilities at all times and will not get involved in any way that has not been agreed with you beforehand.
You will also receive peer support online: in our forum and groups, you can exchange ideas with other mentors should questions or problems arise in your mentorship.
Your contact to the alma mentoring team:
Email: alma@univie.ac.at
Phone: 0043-1-4277-28007