The unexpected benefits of mentoring others
At some point in your career, you may well be advised to seek out a mentor. The idea is that if someone who is further along in their journey guides you, you can move faster in yours. For the most part, this is solid advice. Having a mentor can provide you with invaluable insights, give you tailored support, and get you thinking in ways you wouldn’t otherwise.
However, I’m not going to talk about being a mentee today. Instead, I’d like to inspect the other side of the coin and look at the benefits being a mentor to others can bring. I feel this is an often underrepresented aspect of this relationship and one that deserves more attention.
Deepen knowledge by teaching others
When learning new skills, most people focus on the theory. They take a new course, follow a tutorial, and then think that’s job done. What far fewer people do is then move on to put that newfound knowledge into practice. Even fewer go on to teach others. By not going through the whole process of learning the theory, practicing, and teaching others, you could be missing out on crucial insights on the road to mastery.
Even if you feel you know a subject, there will always be new ways to approach and conceptualise the topic. By teaching others, you don’t simply need to understand the theory. You need to articulate the core concepts so others will understand and internalise them. Explaining concepts to others is a brilliant way to reinforce and deepen your knowledge.
People come at problems from different directions. If you don’t expose yourself to other people’s questions and queries, you might only see the subject from a single perspective. For me, this has been especially apparent when teaching people JavaScript. There is often a variety of ways to achieve the same result. I’ve found my mental models and approaches to problem-solving shift as I’ve interacted with developers of all experience levels.
Mentoring improves soft skills
In any profession, your skillset can be broken down into two categories: hard and soft skills. Hard skills are typically the “technical” part of your role (e.g. writing code, version control, etc.), whereas soft skills, like communication and teamwork, are more difficult to quantify. By mentoring others, you are teaching hard skills using your soft skills, and both of you get a chance to improve.
We pay a lot of attention to learning hard skills. We are inundated with courses, tutorials, and guides teaching us about the latest and greatest tools and technologies. But it’s often your soft skills that will set you apart from others in your field.
Although not set in stone, you’ll often hear people say they’d prefer to work with less technically gifted but more well-rounded teammates than the proverbial “rockstar” with no soft skills. Time invested in improving your communication skills, teamwork, and leadership by mentoring others will make you a better teammate in your professional life and will be time well spent.
Meet others and build strong relationships
There are few better ways to make a lasting impression on someone than to show your willingness to help and guide them. Mentoring others is an incredible way to meet other people in your field and increase your network.
Your professional life isn’t just about the work you do; it’s also the people you meet along the way. By putting yourself out there, you never know who you might meet and what friends and acquaintances you’ll make. I’m still in touch with many people I’ve taught and have even received numerous job interview requests from companies where a former student has recommended me for a role.
Reinforce your own perspectives
As I mentioned earlier, mentoring others is a great way to open yourself up to other people’s viewpoints. However, mentoring is also an incredible way to reinforce (and sometimes even challenge!) your own beliefs and preferred techniques.
Your experiences up to this point in your career have shaped your understanding of the topics you’ve chosen to learn. Over time, you learn what works and what doesn’t. You gain knowledge of particular best practices, workflows, and insights that can help you on a daily basis.
Through mentorship, you’ll be repeatedly recommending particular approaches to help others refine and improve their processes. By continually talking about what’s worked for you, you have a constant reminder of what you’re doing right, which can be extremely valuable.
Boost your CV
If you’re looking for a new role, it helps to find ways to boost your chances of getting your foot in the door at a company and being hired. For any given position you apply to, it’s likely there will be numerous other developers with similar skillsets.
Mentoring others is an excellent way to demonstrate your knowledge, capabilities, and enthusiasm to potential employers. Your mentees could even act as additional references to help a hiring manager get a deeper understanding of your personality and temperament.
Demonstrating that you’re proactively helping others through mentorship might just help tip the balance in your favor.
Where to mentor others
Answering questions
A perfect place to start tackling questions around particular topics of interest is Stack Exchange. Whether you’re answering code-related questions on Stack Overflow or helping people out with code golf solutions, there’s a lot to dive into!
Code reviews and project feedback
Giving project feedback on Frontend Mentor is an incredible way to mentor others without any official commitments. By providing community members support and feedback, you’ll be helping other developers improve their knowledge and can even pick up some new tricks yourself!
With so many ways to complete the challenge projects, you often uncover different techniques and tools. There are community members on Frontend Mentor diving into areas where I’m learning new things for the first time. For example, I’ve seen a rise in people using Svelte, and I often dive into their code which helps me learn more about the tool before I’ve even played around with it myself.
Reviewing PRs within your own company and on open-source projects is another way to help guide others through code reviews and feedback. The act of reading other people’s code and analysing it is an incredible learning experience. Thinking critically about code and providing constructive feedback is a valuable skill set in its own right. You might even come across new mistakes that you hadn’t thought about before, broadening your understanding further.
1:1 mentorship
If you want more 1:1 mentoring experience, MentorCruise and CodingCoach could be great options for you.
MentorCruise enables you to take on mentorship in a more formal capacity. You can get paid for your time and earn some extra money on the side, which is always nice!
CodingCoach is a free, open-source platform where they match volunteer mentors with mentees. If you’re looking to do 1:1 mentorship on a slightly more casual basis, this might work for you.
Coding challenge feedback
If you’re into more logic-based exercises, giving feedback on platforms like Codewars and Exercism could be a perfect fit. With many people completing exercises and looking for feedback, these platforms are always looking for developers to chip in supporting others.
Conclusion
Even if you don’t feel quite ready to take on a mentorship role, I’d strongly recommend giving it a go. Getting out of your comfort zone is an incredible way to grow both personally and professionally.
You don’t need to know everything about a subject to get started either. If you’re one or two steps further along than someone else, you’re in a position to help them.
Plus, it feels pretty good to help others out!
Tags: mentoring, soft skills
9 Comments
While it’s not an option for everyone, tutoring is another way to both stay current and (sometimes) be required to expand your skillset. I’m a part-time, paid staff member for the CIS lab at my local community college, and I can tell you that it’s the only reason I have any knowledge of Python and Ruby – they’ve both been used for our introductory programming courses, so I had to learn both well enough to be able to help students.
It’s also a great way to see complete strangers (at least to begin with) hit that “light bulb” moment when they get what you’re trying to teach them – that’s pretty much what keeps me at that job, after 14+ years.
Sounds great! I think the world needs more teachers like you; those who actually like the subject and interested to learn more.
Sadly my college was filled with teachers who could care less about the subject and would not entertain any “doubts” and “queries” cause it won’t come up in tests anyway so why bother? (smh)
As a lifelong mentor and educator (as well as author and speaker), I’d like to expand on the perspectives offered here by Matt.
Yes, mentoring helps you stay on your toes, build connections, learn new things, advance your career, influence others, etc. And, yes, this can all apply to the professional setting. But it also has non-professional benefits for everyone involved (and even those who are not directly involved).
Mentoring assures that we don’t get trapped into ego-centric thinking. It keeps us flexible and open to ideas. It causes us to work to improve our communication and social skills. It provides opportunities to build patience, to try again when an attempt at something doesn’t work as we’d hoped. And that just makes us better people all around. It translates to our non-work relationships with significant others. It causes us to see our kids differently, to see the value in spending more time with them, to showing some empathy instead of judgement when they themselves don’t learn something the way a particular teacher in their lives might be teaching it. Honestly, it can even wind up curbing vices from road rage to celebrity gossip, because in thinking outside of our own perspective and needs, we begin to see those other “background characters” around us as real, whole people.
Mentoring can also add a sense of purpose to our lives—knowing that we are having a positive impact that will reach beyond the smallness of ourselves.
Knowledge Mastery Breakdown:
– Receiving the knowledge 25%
– Applying the knowledge 25%
– Teaching the knowledge 50%
If anyone ever cared to master a particular set of knowledge, you must go full circle as this is the only True way to cover all your bases and fill in any small gaps or exclusions previously missed. Ironically enough acquiring the first 50% makes the last 50% much more manageable and rewarding. The two sides of the coin are complimentary. Think of the process in terms of sculpting pottery. The first 50% includes getting your materials and equipment, and then crafting your vessel. The last 50% is baking in the furnace which reveal any cracks or other defects that might exist. In this example each day of teaching is represented by vessel and each day one can perform the fire test and see the results as they are, adapt or evolve your methods and try again.
Hi, I am a Chinese student.Due to my previous experience, I totally agree with Matt’s opinion on self-improving through mentoring others. I had studied in Germany for two years, majored on particle physics. It was an intimidating subject. I was extremely nervous at the very first beginning in Germany. I had worked for several years before I took my further education overseas. So I could not catch up with the majorities. But my German classmates and teammates never mocked me or despised me. In stead that they offered me a lot of help. Actually they played the role more as a mentor or teacher rather than teammates. Because they had to find solution with me and explain the reason for every step, ensuring that I acquired the goal, workflow and implementing on each project. Sometimes I felt embarrassed on being stuck by something and suggested to move on for saving their time. Nevertheless, they insisted on showing me or teaching me till I got it with patience. For they believed that they would develop a better understanding on the subject if they taught someone who didn’t know it.
I really appreciated and got benefit from my German teammates’ mentorship. And I will do the same in the future if someone is in my shoes.
Deepen knowledge by teaching others.
It happens all time! I don’t fully understand something until I try to teach it to some mate.
This is the belief we adopted when building our coding assessment platform. Human error is a common thing and having coding tests rated by an algorithm seems a bit unreliable in comparison to human coding, and with Geektastic we provide feedback to the participants to help them evolve their future programming
I agree Matt Studdert, the benefits of mentoring are beyond belief! I’ve been in the industry for years and I still expand my connections and learn something new every day with my Mentees using Lisnic.com.
Love this article Matt! It’s just fantastic to have a Mentor in your corner. I was experiencing a few setbacks and my Mentor (who I found on Lisnic.com) sat down with me to devise a whole new success strategy, I felt so much better afterwards