Career mentoring – a mentor’s guide
The process of becoming a mentor is facilitated by Career Connections, the new ICAS career mentoring platform. Learn more about what’s involved and how to get started.
Career Connections is the new ICAS career mentoring platform. It enables relationships between ICAS Members, helping prospective mentors connect with mentees, no matter where they are in the world, with the ability to message, set up and host either online or in-person meetings.
To become a mentor, you start by creating a profile on Career Connections, noting details of your relevant skills and experience. If a mentee’s search matches your details, they’ll be able to contact you directly to begin the process.
Note: Career Connections is only available to ICAS Students (above the age of 18) or fully admitted active Members who have paid their subscription. If you have any access issue queries, please contact careermentoring@icas.com for assistance.
Below you’ll find a summary of how the process works, our Career Connections Guidelines and a link to log in and get started.
What you need to become a mentor
To become a career mentor, it doesn’t matter where you are in your career and there’s no requirement to be an expert in any specific area of business or practice – although, the more experience you have, the more you’ll be of value to certain mentees. Instead, the main requirements are a passion for helping others, the time to commit to the process (approximately one session per month) and a good balance of interpersonal skills such as empathy, listening and communication.
A good mentor also needs to be comfortable with being challenged and must be able to give and receive valuable feedback.
Getting started as a mentor
Here’s a summary of how the process works for mentors:
- If you’re interested in becoming a mentor, register on Career Connections and create a mentor profile, providing as much information as possible.
- Before you register, we suggested that you whitelist the icas@onpld.com platform email address, so that you receive all auto-emails from the platform.
- If your skills and experience match the requirements of a potential mentee, you’ll appear in their list of search results.
- If selected, they’ll either send you a mentoring request or a direct message to ask for more information.
- You can then accept or decline the request or respond to the message.
- Once a request is accepted, the mentee will arrange to meet via the platform for an initial conversation.
- If you decline the request, the mentee will receive a notification to confirm and allow them to approach an alternative mentor.
From the initial meeting onwards
Once you’ve accepted a mentoring request, you and your mentee should meet, online or in-person (if preferred and possible), to explore and confirm the potential of the mentoring engagement.
Upon connecting, you should expect:
- To always be treated, and to treat others, with respect.
- To challenge and support your mentee to achieve their goals.
Reach an agreement of mentoring
A successful mentoring relationship requires clear communication from the outset. To help achieve this, we recommend that you use our template to create a Mentoring Relationship Agreement. This should outline your shared understanding and expectations for the mentoring relationship and be referred to regularly throughout your mentoring engagement to help keep everything on track.
Using the template, you and your mentee should agree to the following:
- Your mentee’s goals and expectations – what they hope to achieve through the process. These goals may be direct and/or emergent and could range from becoming more self-aware to expanding their professional network.
- Confidentiality – note if any third parties be informed, and if so, what can be discussed with them.
- Availability – how often you will be available to meet.
- Duration of the relationship – e.g. three months, six months, one year.
- Meeting and communication format – will you meet online, by phone, in-person.
- Roles and responsibilities – who will set the agenda for meetings, etc.
- How feedback will be handled.
- Review and evaluation – of the relationship and your mentee’s progress.
Career Connections keeps you in control
Career Connections keeps you in control of the mentoring process. If at any point you are unavailable to mentor, you can easily update your profile status to reflect this. Before you register, we suggested that you whitelist the icas@onpld.com platform email address, so that you receive all auto-emails from the platform.
Use our Career Connections Guidelines
Our Career Connections Guidelines explain the whole process in more detail and will help you and your mentee maximise the benefits of the mentoring experience. You can download the guidelines below or find them in the ‘Resources’ tab on the Career Connections platform.
Get started at Career Connections
Log in to Career Connections (with the email and password you use for your icas.com profile), set up your mentor profile and get started – and remember you can always find all the help and information you need in the 'Resources' tab on the platform.