Why You Should Care That Stars Suddenly Align for Mentoring

 

Over recent weeks in The Eye, I have been covering many topics that may have seemed unrelated, but now as a group point to an effective workforce management strategy. Here's a list of the drivers:

• The IT industry is at "full employment", making it difficult to hire the skills you need.
• IT organizations must develop skills from within to maintain workforce performance
• IT organizations must use informal training and social learning techniques an tools to train quickly  and cost-effectively
• There are many more high performers in the workforce than previously assumed

 Why You Should Care #1

You need workers with excellent skills to make your projects successful. The current environment is putting a constraint on your ability to field a project workforce with those skills. Some of the hardest skills for you to build are those of managers (including team leads) or of IT experts in rare skills who can train others.

 One solution to build these skills is through mentoring. Mentoring is a "informal training" that can be enabled by social tools and techniques available today. It allows an IT organization to quickly upgrade the skills of the many high performers ready to add more value to projects. While coaching is a technique suited for hard skills, mentoring is particularly suited for soft skills used by managers and leaders.

 In recent years mentoring has been growing up. For example, there is now at least one product (from Nobscot Corp) that matches mentors and protégés based on mutual professional interests similar to the services that match couples. You can read how one company used this product here (registration required).

 In any case a lot has been learned about what works and does not work in mentoring programs. See what Bloomberg and Harvard Business say here.

 Why You Should Care #2

You need some "you" time. That is, you need time away from the fires to enjoy being a protégé yourself, to do better in your career, especially to improve the types of projects you manage or to climb the career ladder. Don't wait for a program to be put in place if you do not have one, find a mentor!  Make sure you are ready as a protégé with these basics. There has never been a better time than now to position yourself for career advancement!