It can require good levels of skill and self-awareness.
You may work with a wide variety of apprentices, who have diverse strengths and development needs. You therefore need to be able to adapt your style and behaviour to suit each apprentice and each situation.
You need to help them to solve problems for themselves, rather than to give them answers or provide solutions.
As with most mentoring relationships, the main objective is for the apprentice to gain new personal skills, experiences and knowledge that will lead to new insights, a greater understanding of themselves and new attitudes and behaviour. These, in turn, lead to better personal and professional performance in the workplace.
Your objective with mentoring is to help to develop the apprentice’s own resourcefulness.
It can be challenging when someone is in the early stages of their career not to be tempted to tell them what they should do. However, it’s important to encourage apprentices to be in the driving seat of their own careers so that they develop into accountable employees – after all, the apprentice is the one who will live with the results. This does not mean the mentor should not offer useful information, but it is up to the mentee to decide whether to use it. So mentoring does not mean giving advice. Giving advice implies the mentor always ‘knows best’, and it also leads to dependency – the opposite of what the mentor is trying to achieve.
