Career Mentoring- Your 1st meeting

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Your first meeting with your mentee

• Ideally your mentee should have gotten in contact with you to set the date/ time / video call platform for your mentoring session.

• You might feel a bit nervous about your first meeting but don’t worry about it – a lot of people do. You might be thinking, ‘How will we start?’ or ‘What are we going to talk about?’

• It’s a good idea to devote some thought to your first meeting because it’s extremely important. If you get off to a good start, everything else should be much easier.

Starting the first meeting

To get started, you could:

• make yourselves comfortable: even though you are meeting online, try to simulate having a face to face chat; have a drink for yourself and suggest they have one too, sit in a comfortable space, get to know each other

• tell your mentee something about yourself: this could include information about your personal life as well as your professional life – whatever feels right for you

• explain why you got involved with CodeYourFuture’s Career Mentoring Program: for example, talk about your motivation for mentoring, what you might do together and what you both might get out of it.

Remember: if you don’t hit it off straight away, don’t panic. It takes time to build any relationship and it will get easier the more you meet because you’ll build up trust and get used to each other.

What is the first meeting for?

The first meeting is all about getting your relationship off to a good start by establishing some ground rules and acknowledging that the relationship is two-way. This is also the best time to agree about what you hope to achieve, and share your expectations with one another.

We recommend you cover the mentee’s ambitions and goals in relation to:

• any particular professional issues they face

• their achievements so far and how to build on them

• realistic expectations for type of role, company, salary

• scale of priorities (learning tech skills, professional skills, finding a job)

• areas in which they would find input most useful

You should also cover a few basic essentials:

• when you would like to meet – how often and for how long

• vehicle for follow-up meetings (Zoom, Hangouts, Slack, phone call)

• how you will keep in touch (by email and or Slack) and how you will remind each other of future meetings.

• discussing and agreeing how you will work together

• confidentiality vs privacy (the content of your meetings is private; your mentee will have control over how any of their information is shared)

• responsibilities of mentor and mentee

• how you will record progress and issues/targets for further development (both mentor and mentee please use the Career Mentoring Feedback Form)