The company world is constantly changing and in recent years a new concept has emerged: mentoring. It consists of a person with business experience who offers his/her collaboration to another (usually someone with little experience), thus, its objective is to benefit others through their knowledge and experience. It must be taken into account that the mentor is precisely the one who helps the other.
Mentoring is a practice started in some companies
Someone who is starting his professional career (an apprentice) and receives guidance from someone who has accumulated experience and quality over the years. This relationship is always established between two individuals: an apprentice who has a profile of personal initiative and potential within an entity; and the mentor he has tends to share the experience of his career.
The purpose of this strategy is to optimize a company’s human resources by putting two professionals in contact: one who teaches what they know and the other who is willing to learn . A similar mechanism, with some similarities, is what happens in another process , coaching.
Mentoring is in fashion, but it is a very old practice
Historically, every teacher has always helped a novice to develop their professional career.
For mentoring to be effective, some companies establish a two-pronged program. In the first, the apprentice makes a plan for his personal development, that is, what he would like to achieve professionally in the future, and for that he establishes a series of goals. In the second aspect of the program, the mentor must supervise the apprentice’s work. The idea is to create a mutually enriching relationship, in business terms the term feedback is used.
On certain occasions, this teaching-learning process is registered through a document : the mentoring contract. Its purpose is to make both parties clear about their role and what can be expected of the other. The mentoring contract is also made to formalize the commitment of both participants and thus avoid false expectations.
Like so many other realities, mentoring has its origins in antiquity, more specifically, in Greek mythology. The mentor is a character from Homer’s Odyssey, especially the friend of Odysseus, in charge of the education of his son Telemachus.
