Mentorship SOP / Guidelines
Intro
The purpose of this SOP is to make it easier for mentors to understand their role and responsibilities, and to streamline the way our interns receive mentorship, education, growth and development.
What Does it Mean to be a Mentor?
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/what-is-a-mentor
“A mentor is an individual who acts as an adviser or coach for a less experienced or advanced mentee, providing expertise and professional knowledge from a more experienced perspective. At the core of the relationship, a mentor is available to their mentee to offer advice, provide support and answer questions. Mentors protect the interests of their mentees. Mentees often learn from this relationship, and mentors frequently benefit from acting as trusted advisers.”
For emphasis: The mentorship relationship can be beneficial for both sides, where the mentor can learn just as much from the mentee as the mentee may learn from their mentor.
Responsibility: Daily Mentorship
When your mentor is in the office, try to be a helpful resource to guide them through tasks and projects, offering advice, tutorials and suggestions to help.
This does not have to be formalized or consistent, just make sure you are available to help when they have questions related to your shared field of work.
Responsibility: Biweekly Checkpoints
As a mentor, your primary responsibility is to hold biweekly meetings with your intern. Hold these for 15-30 min when you are both in office / online. Zoom or in-person is fine.
These should be super simple, minimal to no prep needed.
Some things you can do during these meetings:
- You can talk about their internship experience: How are they doing? What have they been enjoying working on? What feedback do they have?
- You can talk about their classes: It can be related to their career goals, personal goals, or degree experience.
- You can offer feedback: Either of you can bring in a piece the intern has worked on and talk about the pros / cons, what they could try next time, what you liked about it, etc
- Anything else you want to. There are no required subjects, these are just suggestions.
Make sure the time is engaging, and you are having a nice one-on-one conversation with them. You can encourage the mentee to ask questions and talk with you about things related to their classwork, career goals, internship, and more.
While these meetings are private between you and your mentee, you can share any important notes / comments to the CEO/Operations Manager to make improvements for the future.
Resources
- Each mentee will have a checklist of their completed tasks which you can reference during your discussions. Message the Operations Manager to receive a shared link.