Five Things My Mentors Taught Me

Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.

  Career Development   Talent Management  

Career development and training go hand in hand with mentoring. If you can find a few good mentors in your career, you’ll be much better off than having to experience the pitfalls of the work world all alone. Over the past decade and a half of turning digital bytes into IT business value, I’ve been fortunate to have several formal and informal mentors help me along the way. Some mentors were formally assigned, others were former supervisors and others never knew I considered them a mentor. Below are the top five bits of career advice that I still keep fresh in my mind.

Career Tip #1: Fail Fast
Rajan Nagarajan was an executive assigned to be my IT mentor in my first “real job” as an IT programmer analyst. He encouraged me to fail fast and learn from the mistakes quickly rather than repeat the same mistakes again and again. Of course, I was an overconfident 22 year old who thought failure was impossible. After all, I was a year out of college and had all the answers. My naive overconfidence would actually become my “fail fast” opportunity when working on a project where the consulting company was responsible for the end-to-end delivery instead of the corporate employees.

After a few conflicts with the consulting firm’s project manager, I had one of those crucial conversations that demonstrated how I failed to work effectively…

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