This is mentoring
Mentoring is when one person
their experience within a longer lasting process to others.
to others. In Carreer Mentoring, one:mentor:in works with each of
one:a mentee in the period of about 3-12 months on one of these professional topics:
- Master Plan
- Beginning a career
- International
- Self-employed
What makes mentoring so effective are mainly 3 factors:
Benefiting from individual experiences
All the professional issues you deal with in Career Mentoring,
present you with a series of small and large decisions. Predicting how you will feel about a decision you make, however, is often difficult. What can lead to a
better understanding is to ask others about their
experiences with similar decisions. This level of
effectiveness, mentoring has a head start on other forms of support such as counseling
and coaching.
Get personal support
In mentoring, you will have access to knowledge and experience, but in addition
you also have a personal contact person at your disposal. In this way, mentoring also has an affective effect:
At the end of a successful mentoring process, you will not only have gained knowledge
but also feel strengthened in your path.
Long-term support
Mentoring
is a process. We recommend a period of time for a mentorship of
about 3-12 months. This will result in several benefits for you: Some
questions will emerge only in the course of the mentorship, you can be accompanied in situations as they develop, and the relationship with your mentor will become more and more one of trust, the work together becomes more profound and you will also gradually be able to better assess when you can draw on the experience of your mentors and when you can be oriented and where you should perhaps find your own way
should find.
Your role as a mentee
As a mentee you are responsible for the organizational processes of the mentorship. Main responsibility, i.e. you administer the mentorship via the mentoring platform and take care of scheduling appointments, the mentoring agreement. In short
you are responsible for ensuring that the time resources of the mentors are met by relieving them of the administrative steps that are
necessary to run a mentorship.
More on this in Mentorship.
Recommendations for mentoring
To build a successful mentoring relationship, we recommend keeping the following principles in mind:
The experiences of mentor are an offering, not a blueprint
mentors
offer their experience and their opinion on how you can handle a situation
situation as a possibility. As a mentee, you make your own decisions. This also means that during your mentorship you remain independent and take responsibility for your progress.
Mentoring is a working relationship
As a
Mentee you are in a transitional phase and this can be
psychologically and emotionally exhausting at times. You can and should
communicate stressful situations to your mentor,
After all, the work in a mentorship requires your
capacities, on which the speed of the mentorship, the frequency of meetings and the scope of the topics discussed.
If you are (at times) overwhelmed by the pace of the mentorship, please communicate this to your mentor rather than letting time pass without contact.
Please remain aware of your and your mentor's role in this working relationship and stay as close as possible to the topics that were agreed upon at the beginning of the mentorship and that are written in the mentoring agreement. In this way, you will have a good overview of the topics and issues you have worked on with your mentor in retrospect.
Mentor:in are not Google
Your mentor is excited to share her/his knowledge and professional experience with you. He:She is however, not to be understood as a mediator of overview knowledge or as a substitute for your simple Internet research.
The maimentoring team will be happy to answer any questions you may have about the process, and for any other questions you may have about starting a career, you are also welcome to take advantage of the Career Center's free counseling and event service.
Your mentor
The first step for mentees is to find a potential mentor on the Career Mentoring Platform. This does not require a 100 percent match between your search criteria and the profiles of the mentors. A match of 50% is already suitable for a successful mentoring process. However, you should definitely follow a few tips on the search, which you can find in our FAQs.
Who are the mentors?
The Mentors of the Career Mentoring Program are mostly graduates of the University of Graz who volunteer as mentors.
How do I find the right person for my mentorship?
It is is important that before you start a mentorship, you think about which topics you want to work on and what questions you have. You should write this down in your profile in the fields "My current situation", "My goal(s)" and "What help do I want?" These details are visible to the mentor after you submit your request. The clearer you know yourself, what your needs in a mentorship, the better the mentor can assess whether they can support you.
Time required
We recommend for a Mentorship a period of about 3-12 months with about monthly meetings of about 1 ½ hours.
Prior to a mentorship. you will also need time to complete your profile and write your mentorship request which you can save and revise there.
In addition, be sure to prepare for the mentorship:
Attend a kick-off meeting or the kick-off workshop for mentees that we offer once a month during the semester, or read the
information here on the website diligently. The information on the
page is perfectly adequate to prepare you for a mentorship, the
advantage of attending a webinar is the opportunity to,
to ask questions directly to the Career Mentoring Team. You can
us of course also at any time by e-mail or phone with
contact us with your questions: mentoring@uni-graz.at or 0316/380-1821.
You can find dates for events in the calendar of your profile page.
Further support
In addition to Career Mentoring, the Career Center of the University of Graz also offers professional counseling and coaching for professional topics, which you can take advantage of in addition to Mentoring.Here's how to get to the Career Center.
From WS2023/24 on, you can have your participation in the mentoring program credited to your studies. You will receive 2 ECTS points for your elective subject!