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This is mentoring

• career entry and career guidance,
• self-employment and start-up or
• working abroad.

The boundaries between mentoring, consulting and coaching are fluid. Each of these types of support have specific advantages that can complement each other. In addition to alma mentoring, the University of Vienna also offers professional counselling and coaching for career-related issues to its students. You can find these here under "Further support ..."

This brief overview shows how these terms can be distinguished from each other and their respective benefits:

Mentoring
Personal experience serves as a guideline
Objectives: Empowerment, personal relationship
Benefit: Impact of decisions becomes tangible

Counseling
Expertise and overview
Objectives: Gain information with clear objectives
Benefit: Provides expert- and overview-knowledge

Coaching
Based on a specific methodology 
Objectives: Strategic work on own goal development
Benefit: Provides effective long-term self-skills

This is how mentoring supports you

What makes mentoring so effective are 3 main factors:

1. You benefit from individual experiences.
   All of the job-related issues that you face will present you with a series of small and large decisions. Scientific research has shown that people are not particularly good at predicting how they will fare with the effects of a decision they make. What can lead to a better understanding of this is to ask others about their experiences with similar decisions. This level of effectiveness puts mentoring ahead of other forms of support such as counselling and coaching.
2. You will receive emotional support 
   Within a mentorship, you will have access to someone's knowledge and experience, but in addition you will also have a person at your side who is emotionally supportive of you. Thus, mentoring give you affective support: at the end of a successful mentorship, you will not only have gained knowledge, but you will also feel strengthened in your path.
3. Long-term process
   Mentorship is a process. We recommend a period of time for a mentorship of about 6-8 months. This will result in several benefits for you: Some of your questions will only emerge during the course of the mentorship and you will be accompanied in situations as they develop. The relationship with your mentor will become more and more trusting, making your experience more profound. You will gradually be able to better assess when you can draw on the experiences of your mentor or where you should perhaps find your own way. 
   

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Your mentor

The first step for mentees in alma Mentoring is to find the right person on the alma platform who can act as a personal mentor. A 100% match between your search criteria and the profiles of the mentors is not necessary; a successful mentoring process is already possible with only a 50% match. However, you should definitely follow a few tips regarding the search, which you can find in our FAQs.

Who are the alma mentors?

The mentors you will find on the alma platform are graduates of the University of Vienna who do this work on a voluntary basis simply because they want to pass something on to you and support you. 

Please note that the alma team is not in personal contact with all alma mentors. The identity of mentors is checked through an ID upload at registration, but beyond that we rely on your help to keep up to date with the progress of your mentorship and your work with mentors. To keep in touch during your ongoing mentorship, you will receive regular automated feedback requests.
 

How do I find the right person for my mentorship?

It is important to think about what topics you want to work on and what questions you have before you start a mentorship. The more precise you  know what your needs are in a mentorship, the better mentors can assess how they can help you. 

This does not mean that you already have to have concrete goals in order to start a mentorship. Mentees bring very different needs to a mentorship. Some are still at the very beginning of their journey and need support with a basic orientation, others already know quite well where they want to go and want to work on concrete goals: The mentorship is there to provide you with the support you need!

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How a mentorship works

Time commitment

We recommend a period of about 6-8 months for a mentorship with meetings of about 1 ½ hours every month. 

Before a mentorship, you will also need time to fill out the mentorship request in your profile, which you can save and revise there. 

In addition, be sure to prepare for mentorship by either attending an alma Webinar for mentees that we offer about monthly during a semester, or by reading through the information on the website. The information on the website is sufficient to prepare you for a mentorship, however the advantage of attending a Webinar is that you can ask questions directly to the alma team. You can of course also contact the alma team at any time via email with any questions: alma@univie.ac.at

Dates for Webinars can be found in the calendar on your profile page.

Your role as a mentee 

As a mentee, you are responsible for the organizational processes in the mentorship, i.e. you administer the mentorship on the alma platform and take care of appointments. In short, you are responsible for ensuring that the time resources of the mentors are valued by taking over those administrative steps that are necessary to keep a mentorship going.

Read more about this in Mentorship.

Recommendations for a Mentorship

To build a successful mentorship-relationship, we recommend keeping the following principles in mind:

• The experiences of mentor*s are a proposal, not a blueprint:
  Mentors offer their experience and opinion on how you can handle a situation as an option: as a mentee, you make your own decisions. This also means that you need to remain independent in a mentorship and take responsibility for your progress. 
• Mentoring is a working relationship:
  As a mentee you are in a transitional phase and this can be psychologically and emotionally stressful at times. You can and should definitely communicate stressful situations to your mentors, after all, your ressources determine the speed of the mentorship, the frequency of meetings and the scope of the topics discussed. If you are (at times) overwhelmed by the pace of the mentorship, please be sure to communicate this to your mentors instead of letting time pass without making contact!
  Please remain aware of your and your mentors' role in this working relationship and try to stick to the topics that were agreed upon at the beginning of the mentorship. Personal matters may of course also be discussed in a mentorship, but this should at most contextualise the mentoring process and not take over as content. 
• Mentors are not Google:
  Mentors answer your questions from the context of their own experiences and are not responsible for providing overview knowledge. If some of your questions cannot be answered in the mentorship, use the forum or the Mentoring Wiki on the alma platform for more information. If you do not find what you are looking for there, you can also contact the alma team or Uniport, the career service of the University of Vienna, with your questions. 
  Also, please do not ask your mentors questions that can be answered by a simple internet search: A mentorship is meant to be an additional support and not a substitute for other opportunities available to you for your process.

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Costs

The alma Mentoring is a service for members of the Alumni Association of the University of Vienna. 

You are already a member of the Alumni Association of the University of Vienna
You can participate in the alma Mentoring if you have acquired a membership with the full fee of 36,00 EUR/year. Please contact alma@univie.ac.at for an alma Mentoring access-code stating your full name and membership number. 

You are not yet a member of the alumni association of the University of Vienna
You can access all contents of the site even without membership in the Alumni Association just by registering on the alma platform and search for possible mentors for yourself at your leisure. 
However, if you want to send a mentorship-request you need to pay your membership fee of 36,00 EUR, which you can do directly via the payment system on the alma platform. 

Both the entry of an access code (existing members) as well as the payment of the membership fee (new members) is only required before sending a mentorship request! 

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Further support at the University of Vienna

In addition to alma mentoring, the University of Vienna offers extensive assistance for students and graduates in the transition from study to work as well as for business start-ups and self-employment: 

Uniport, the career service of the University of Vienna, offers young academics professional support in the transition from study to work. In counselling sessions, coaching and workshops, the personal professional profile is sharpened. Students and graduates gain know-how on the topics of career orientation, job search and self-presentation.  Feedback on application documents (CV & letter of motivation) and preparation for job interviews are also central parts of the counselling work - accompanying mentoring. 

u:start is the training programme for self-employment, entrepreneurship and business start-ups at the University of Vienna. From the development of one's own business idea to in-depth seminars on marketing, accounting, financial planning, sales training and customer acquisition, the program offers everything that those interested in starting a business need to put their company on a solid footing.
The u:start program takes place in annual rounds. For information on the next round and application deadline, please contact the u:start team at: ustart@univie.ac.at

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