Frequently asked questions
Becoming a mentor is an act of great generosity and personal development that can bring lots of benefits to both parties. The key reasons for becoming a mentor are:
- Support young talents in your industry, helping them in exploiting their potential and start their careers.
- Improve your leadership and communication skills.
- Build a new long-term relationship with bright talents in your industry.
If you are a professional with one year of experience, then you can apply to become a mentor.
The programme is dedicated to people with strong motivation and with a mix of:
- Experience on a cosmopolitan/international, academic or working level.
- Relevancy of your role and experience in your industry.
- A genuine interest in helping others via our mentoring programme, events or leadership roles.
- Adherence to the UIS values and principles and desire of being part of our community.
To have the best matching process between mentees and mentors, both parties will be required to specify personal areas of interest, passions and objectives. In addition, mentors will be able to specify how many mentees they would like, area of origin, industry sector, university etc...
Via these data, the Mentoring Programme team will propose mentees to mentors aiming to provide the best experience possible for both.
The effort required to be a mentor will be of a minimum of a call between mentee and mentor every 2 months, with the call lasting 1 hour.
The communication tools used, frequency of meetings or the extra effort will be left to the mentor and the mentee to decide. If possible, some mentors might decide to meet with the mentee in person or help the mentee with other needs, beyond the minimum effort required.
We consider any mentoring relationship to be unique and we expect the mentee and the mentor to make it flourish. We can provide some guidelines to build a successful mentoring relationship:
- Before meeting, plan ahead when to host the session, how many sessions you can have, for how long, on what aspects you would like to focus and what communication tools you would like to use (in person, via phone, Zoom, etc...).
- Decide some objectives you want to pursue. What are 2 or 3 objectives the mentee would like to achieve for the next year? Write or speak about how you would like to achieve such objectives on time.
- Have a session at least once every two months, discussing progress towards the objectives and planning the next steps.
- Get to know the mentee: ask many questions about her. Mentoring is about listening more than talking.
- Be proactive in breaking any friction there might be due to the difference in seniority or roles.
- Share your network with the mentees to maximise their opportunities.
- Provide honest feedback. Being a cheerleader won't be useful.
- Be authentic. Share details about your life. Talk and laugh about your failures and successes. In this way, the relationship between mentor and mentee will be stronger showing that even mentors are not infallible.
- Treat any conversation and information exchanged between you and your mentee as strictly confidential and private.