The Value of Mentoring

Category: Tips and Advice Publish date: 31/08/2017

Mentoring during transition can be an invaluable way of honing your military skills, knowledge and experience for the civilian labour market and augment your CV with a recent activity aligned with your career goals.

Mentoring is simply a relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or a less knowledgeable person. Mentoring is far from a modern concept, the origins of the word go back to Homers Odyssey in ancient Greece, so it is an age-old, tried and tested method of passing knowledge on to the next generation.

Although you will have developed a range of hard and soft skills that employers are in demand of on Civvy Street, you have probably had limited exposure to using those skills in a commercial environment. One way of mitigating the impact of this is to seek a mentoring relationship with an employer who you can learn from and receive advice from to hone your skills to what the civilian labour market requires.

Other benefits of being a mentee can include:

Labour market knowledge	Build your confidence
Industry specific knowledge	Further build your network
Understand civilian workplace culture	Receive constructive criticism
Build on your strengths	Discover your weaknesses
Improve your communication skills	Gain a reference or CV building
Receive impartial advice	Objective reflection of practice

Some employers will have structured mentoring or internship placements available for which you can apply to just like a job, others may offer to mentor in a much more individualised and informal manner. It may be a corporate objective of an organisation to offer mentoring or it can be an individual doing so for their own personal reasons.

A mentor may offer an opportunity when they are aware of a particular skills gap they wish to fill in their industry or may be ex-forces themselves, a want to ‘give something back’ to other veterans, but remember they will often be doing so unpaid and in addition to their normal role, so their time, availability and resource may be limited.

There is no fixed definition of what a mentoring relationship will actually entail and is often subjective to what the mentor is willing or has the resources to offer. Therefore there can be vast variations with the amount of participation required by you as mentee; some established schemes may require a set number of hours or days to complete; other more informally organised opportunities might just be an occasional meeting and some remote support.

You may want to achieve different outcomes from mentoring, one might be just to learn about an industry sector to get a taste of what it’s like to work in and another may be to ‘get your foot in the door’ for an actual job with the mentors organisation, so it is important to establish with your mentor your goals to ensure they are in line with what they can offer and avoid any disappointment.

You may choose to use some of your Graduated Resettlement Time if the mentoring relationship leads to a Civilian Work Attachment (CWA), an internship, or even an interview so try to recognise any opportunities tacitly offered by your mentor, if that is your objective.

Don’t forget, being a mentee could give you an insight that would put you off working for a particular employer or in a particular industry sector and whilst that might be initially disappointing, it is still a valuable insight to have learnt during your transition and can help you make better choices going forward.

How to find mentoring opportunities:

• On RightJob as Civilian Work Attachments or work experiences
• Networking via electronic means on LinkedIn
• Networking at physical events such as CTP Employment Fairs or Insight Days
• Sending speculative emails to you network
• Range of support organisations for Veterans.

Examples of Mentoring Schemes

Royal British Legion Mentoring
RBL have an established scheme connecting veterans and mentors in the industry, full details of which can be found here.

Barclays
Barclays is a great example of an employer running an established mentoring and internship scheme for Service Levers. They hold regular Insight Days which you can attend to find out more about the opportunities, details of which will always be updated on their Employer Focus page.

BT Transition Force
BT regularly host free Transition Force events – designed to help you gain valuable industry insights, extend your networks and show employers how your military experience will benefit their business. They have a ‘buddy’ system in place to connect you to someone who has previously served in the military and now works for BT. See their future events on the CTP Events calendar listed under Networking Events.

X-Forces
Providing self-employment advice for the Armed Forces community, X-Forces have a dedicated mentoring programme, details of which can be found here.