How to Find and Get the Most out of a Mentor in Your Engineering Career

The following is a summary of Session 5 of my podcast, The Engineering Career Coach (TECC) Podcast with Anthony Fasano, PE. I will summarize the main points in this session here; however, you can also listen to the show through the player below or by subscribing on iTunes. I offer a career-changing tip at the end of each podcast session.

Most engineers don’t realize the value of a mentor in their careers. Mentors can expedite your career development by giving you strategies and guidance in minutes that took them years to learn.

The key with mentoring is finding the right mentor. Failure to do so will waste your time, as well as that of the person you have chosen as a mentor.

In this podcast session, I will give a young engineer the steps he should take to find the right mentor in his engineering career. My guest for Session 5 is Praveen from India, a materials engineer who is 36 years old. The key points that I outlined with this young engineer are as follows:

• When seeking out a mentor, you want to find someone who has achieved goals similar to those you are pursuing.
•  You cannot be your own mentor because you are too familiar with yourself. You need someone with a different perspective to give you honest feedback.
• If you are not clear on your goals, it will be difficult to select the right mentor for you, because you will not be able to select one that has goals similar to yours.
• You can find a mentor through your own company, professional societies and associations, or websites like LinkedIn.com.
• Unless you have regular meetings with your mentor and take action consistently, it will be difficult to make real progress in your career. You won’t just magically advance once you find a mentor. You must take action through the mentoring relationship.
• In order to have a successful relationship with your mentor, you should define your goals in your first meeting. Then you should plan to meet regularly with your mentor and create several action items that you can take between each session.

Implementing these strategies will help you find the right mentor and get the most out of the mentoring relationship.

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This is a guest post by Anthony Fasano, PE, author of Engineer Your Own Success. Anthony found success as an engineer at a very early age and now writes and podcasts to help other engineers do the same. Visit Anthony’s website atEngineeringCareerCoach.com and subscribe to the top 3 resources Anthony has used to become a partner in a firm at the age of 27.