How do you choose your mentor

Author: Martina Knitter, Mentoring Team Switzerland

The participants if this year’s competition “Best Receptionist if the year 2021” in Austria, Germany and Switzerland have the great opportunity to choose one of the AICR Certified mentors to support and guide the during their next career steps.

As we have mentioned in previous articles  it is absolutely essential that mentor and mentee match well. For this reason the Comitee has decided that the mentee can lead the matching process by choosing his or her favorite mentor.

This very important task certainly needs some time and more importantly good preparation. I would recommend the following steps.

A) Ask yourself some relevant questions, which you later can also discuss in your first meeting

  1. what are my expectation of this relationship
  2. what are my goals
  3. where do I need help to reach them
  4. what do I want to learn
  5. what kind of Mentor do I want?
  6. in what language would I like to do the sessions
  7. would regular personal meetings be important for me (or is online OK either)

B) Check the Profiles of the mentors on the webseite, the Blog as well as their Linkdin Profiles.

  1. AICR United Kingdom
  2. AICR Switzerland 
  3.  AICR Germany, AICR Austria &: NEW Mentors

Some questions to guide you through the available information

  1. could they offer answers of my question’s
  2. what do we have in common, so we could built on
  3. is this the mentoring type I look for?

If you can’t decide between two mentor’s you might want to talk to both of them as a personal conversation is certainly more clarifying. Additionally it needs to work for both sides. If it does the  sucess story of mentoring can start here.  Nevertheless it is essential that both parties are committed and prepared for the sessions.

Vithay from Singapore- the first runner up from the international Competition AICR Best Receptionist 2020 was one of the first mentees in our programme.

Please read here how she decided for her mentor:

Vithay:

Reading the different profiles of mentors was exciting, it gave me an opportunity to decide the best mentor for me. Learning about what they have achieved and how they inspire others helped me understand more about mentorship programmes. I had just moved to Germany and I wanted my mentor to be fluent in German so that she could assist me in learning the language and be my first German friend. 
More importantly, I wanted a mentor that would guide and motivate me to be a better version of myself as I take a career break. Time management is something I wanted to work on for myself and reading about how Martina juggles family, work and mentorship programmes certainly got me intrigued. I knew she would be the best mentor to guide me and meeting her helped me find not only a mentor but a friend to seek advice from. 

If you like to learn more about this relationship, please read:

The circle of (changing your) life

And if you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to contact us or comment below.