Navigating Your Career: The Best Questions To Ask Your Mentor

We’re back with the next in our series of guides to help you to have brilliant career development mentoring sessions.

Hopefully you read our blog last week. If not, in summary, it was all about helping anyone who is trying to work their way through their career options, long or short term; and how they can get the most out of these focused conversations with their mentors. You can check it out here LINK.

We know from experience that sometimes mentees really struggle to find the right questions to ask mentors, through these guides we’re hoping to take some of that pain away.

This week I chatted to MaM Founder Barry Cranford about what he recommends for those of you who know your career goal, but could do with some help figuring out how to get there.

‘Is this relevant to me?’ I hear you ask. This is for you if you know what role you want to do and you’d like to speak to people to understand the best path to get there. For the purposes of this guide, ‘role’ can be used to represent a job title, industry, company etc.

What follows are a series of questions Barry’s created to help you to get the most from speaking to a mentor who currently does, or has done, the role you’re looking to get into; or perhaps, those that have observed others who do this role. Here’s Barry’s advice on how to get the most out of this guide.

‘I’d recommend asking the questions to as many people as possible, you’ll find that their answers will likely be very different. People take all kinds of shortcuts and experience a variety of pitfalls throughout their careers, so by speaking to several people you should get a good breadth of opinions.’

Here are Barry’s top questions to help you to make your conversations as effective as possible:

• Can you tell me about your career journey? Why did you want to get into this role and what steps did you take?
• What advice would you give a younger version of yourself trying to get to where you are in half the time?
• Who is the best person you know that does this? What makes them better than others you know?
• Have you personally come across any shortcuts or pitfalls when it comes to getting to where you are?
• Are there any myths about getting to where you are?
• Was there any advice you were given that either worked or didn’t work to get into this?
• Which are the best books you have read on this role?
• Which are the best blogs to read on this subject?
• Are there any current industry trends I should know about?
• Are there any thought leaders you would recommend looking out for that would help me in this role? What are they saying at the moment?
• Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in this role?
• Is there anyone else in your network that I could speak to?

We hope that this’ll help you to have some great conversations. Next time, we’ll be helping out those of you who are perfectly happy doing your current role but just want to get even better at it. Watch this space!

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, check out our website for more information on our friendly (and completely free) mentoring scheme https://meetamentor.co.uk/