Thoughts on Mentorship vs Apprenticeship

I started to seek mentorship this past year after feeling stuck in my career. In college, mentorship always felt natural; I reached out to professors and kept reaching out to those with whom I shared similar headspace. But after graduation, those relationships evolved, and I tended to get assigned a mentor from work. In my experience, it often felt like a forced relationship, especially when your manager is made your mentor. This always created an uncomfortable power dynamic, especially if I’m seeking advice that might involve me leaving that company, which is why I have been seeking mentorship outside of my place of work.

Types of Mentorship

It has taken me a long time to understand what I would like from a mentor and distinguish what has been great about my past mentors. Over the last eight years, I have encountered the following types of mentorship in my life:

Corporate Mentorship — This has typically been someone inside my company who assisted in working with me on professional development. Occasionally, this was defaulted to being my Manager.

Craft-based Mentorship** — Here, you are looking to learn from someone because they are a more senior version of your trade, or you are seeking to transition to their trade.  Paid Mentorship — Some of the above can be paid mentorship, but I have found that there are no exchanges of funds for the healthiest mentorship. However, this has worked best for me when seeking advice for my company but less for personal advice. Professors are also a form of paid mentorship.

Peer Mentorship — This was also easy in school; it was always my classmates, but I have had a more challenging time transitioning this to the workplace. So, I started seeking more of this style through online communities like our Tiny Factories discord group.

Two sides of mentorship — I discovered early how I needed to feel like there was an exchange between me and my mentor. Otherwise, the one-sidedness made me feel guilty or reinforced a power structure that made me uneasy. This dynamic was also more complicated for me to find in a company as it could quickly feel like both parties were checking a professional development box.

Apprenticeship and Mentors

The most valuable thing I have learned from working with mentors on joint projects or short contracts. Seeing all the soft skills they have picked up around managing tasks, teams, side projects, and expectation management, among others, has often shown me skills I might not have known to ask about. These have always been for short periods but have been some of the most valuable moments. 

Don't idolize your mentor.

A common trap I have seen friends fall into is trying to make their hero a mentor. The hero can be a great source of inspiration, but they don't necessarily make good mentors. I would recommend learning from a hero's work, but seek a mentor who you might look up to but don't idealize. Otherwise, you can follow them blindly and diverge from what will make you, well, you. 

Finding a Mentor

The best thing is finding a Trade-based Mentor to help me level my code skills and teach me about running a start-up; at the same time, I am continuing to seek Peer-based mentorship within the Tiny Factories community.