hi friends welcome back to another youtube video in today's video we're going to talk about
mentorship and i'm specifically going to share my experience in my career how mentors have helped me
there are three significant experiences in my career that have
involved mentorship so i'm gonna share those experiences and specifically talk about
why it's important to build those relationships and there's one type of mentorship that i think
is overlooked so often that a lot of us don't take advantage of so i'm going to share that as well
before we jump into the video i do want to say thank you so much to everybody who has been giving
me feedback as you can see my lighting is much much better i have been getting a lot of comments
uh with all of you giving me feedback some of you actually reached out to me on instagram
and gave me a lot of tips on how to improve my lighting so thank you thank you thank you thank
you so much for all the input and all the feedback i take all your feedback seriously and i really
really want to improve my youtube setup as well as my content it's amazing that all of you are part
of my journey so you have seen my like horrible lighting that set of videos where some of the
which i have recorded through webcam my iphone and two now growing into this actual proper youtube
studio setup still like i'm like sitting in my home office but i think this looks way better than
it was so thank you again for all the feedback and input all right with that let's jump into the
video and let's talk about mentorship and why it's important so who is a mentor a mentor is somebody
who is more experienced than you and they are an a trusted advisor to you so when we're talking about
career mentorship this is pretty much basically somebody your senior who has been through what
you are going through right now and or in similar experience and they are able to give you advice
and able to give you guidance based on their experiences and based on their knowledge so
there are two types of mentor before i talk about it because i'm going to touch on both of those
two types of mentors so one is obviously like if you're in a tech role they're like technical
mentors mentors who are giving you guidance on the technical uh know-how standpoint and
there's like then the second part of the mentorship is more like career development
mentorship the first one provides you guidance on how you grow technically the second one is
more of career development now both you can have both of them in one or you can have separate ones
totally totally depends on the scenario and depends on who you have access to in my career
there have been multiple mentors who have who have influenced my career journey and helped me get to
where i am today and that includes both technical mentors as well as career mentors let's talk about
the technical mentors that have specifically influenced my career journey so for some of you
who have watched some of my previous videos you know that i went to a business school and then
i got into data engineering i did take bunch of courses on my own to learn data engineering
but there was still a lot that i learned on the job and every time when somebody's telling you
that they learned on the job it doesn't mean that they sat in front of a computer and they struggled
through it and then they figured it out yes that is part of it but there is always somebody senior
a mentor who is helping you and guiding you for me that was the case as well when i was
starting in data engineering the senior data engineer on the team was my mentor and i owe
it a lot to him because whenever i needed advice whenever i needed guidance whenever i needed to
figure out where to learn something a technical thing that i was working on i would go to him and
i would ask him like what do you think i need to study on what do you think i need to like read on
are there any trainings that i can take what do you suggest doing if i run into this type of
technical issue that was a person that was like highly influential on my data engineering
learning path before i go further into the video i do want to mention that the mentors
that i'm going to mention are primarily all men and last time i mentioned that i got a bit of
hate on twitter where some people saw my video on youtube and then they started bashing me on
twitter basically the backstory of this is tech is a male dominated field so in my team at that time
i only had male managers and male seniors so that senior data engineer was definitely influential
in my career and they helped me grow as a data engineer and were have been a truly an influential
part of my journey now there is not all there are obviously like not everybody is great like
it's hard to find somebody like that i definitely think that i got lucky with ending up in a team
that was super supportive uh specifically having a senior teammate who was by my side and who was
willing to guide me and help me so that in the same team i actually had experience with another
data engineer who actually turned out to be a bully so not everybody is going to help you so
you have to do the work to basically figure out who is interested in your career and who is
willing to develop you and focus your relationship efforts on that person i assume that like when
i was new in my career i assumed that every senior person i will meet would be an amazing
cheerleader an amazing advisor but that that is actually not true not everybody is
there to support you so you have to do the right research and find that person who would be there
to kind of like guide you and mentor you the second mentorship experience that i had
that was also truly influential on my career in data science uh now moving on from data
engineering to data science my manager and i got i know some of you who saw my videos on my
career journey so a lot of you have commented that you got lucky with having a good manager
yes i did get lucky having a great manager actually i didn't know like i interviewed for that
team like i switched the team and i interviewed that party that team and i had coffee with my
manager basically trying to understand what the team does and at that point like when i had coffee
with him but i had the introductory call i kind of got the idea that he sounds like a great person
but it was only until after i joined the team that i realized that he is not only a great
manager he is also a great mentor great advisor and great cheerleader so when i was learning data
science coming going from data engineering to data science that manager basically was my teacher he
we would use r101 the weekly 101 that i would have met with my manager he would basically
give me homework give me guidance on what kind of books i need to read give me ideas
on what kind of projects i need to work and then kind he was like advocate my advocate
outside of that one-on-one meeting room where he would like put me in front of other people
where he would advocate for my work but he would like pitch me and say that she should work sunday
should work on this project i think she has like good potential so we would love to have some this
work on this project so he was not only a great mentor but he was also a great sponsor and now
sponsorship is a completely different thing and i think i should do a different video on this
one comment that i would say like there is a saying that women are over mentored and over
mentored and under sponsored so i will definitely talk about sponsorship in another video and
how i successfully turn my mentors into sponsors but in this video for the sake of keeping it short
i want to only talk about mentorship so yeah talking about my manager i yeah 100 agree i did
get lucky um and obviously like i was working hard like he could see that i would take his advice
and i would action on it so he wanted to help me more even more that again like goes back to like
the mentor-mented relationship you're gonna make sure that when you are building that relationship
you're first of all you need to figure out if that person what what does that person have to offer
that you actually need that will help you in your career because you're going to take their time
they're going to take your time so you want to make sure that the advice that you're getting
from them are actionable and you're going to take action on it so you can show it to your mentor
that how you are taking their advice and making progress on it so that was my second experience
basically under his mentorship i learned data science and officially transitioned from
data engineering family to the data science job family in that team i also had senior teammates
who were data scientists research scientists they were obviously very supportive and i learned a lot
from them but my manager specifically stands out because he put in a lot of work into my career and
he put a lot of work basically using our time to guide me i know typically what managers do
i have heard like horror stories where managers are primarily using those one-on-ones for project
updates but the whole purpose of like those one-on-one relationships with your manager is to
help you grow in your career and project updates is great but that's not gonna help you develop
in your career all right so those were the two big influential mentors in my career one helped me
basically learn the data engineering the other one helped me transition from data engineering to data
science or the last mentor relationship that has helped me and has been influential on my career
it's not actually really one person this is a type of mentorship that a lot of people don't discuss
and a lot of people don't take advantage of it's right there next to you but you're not
taking advantage of what i'm talking about is peer mentoring yeah peer mentoring is basically
people who are at your level not above your level but they are your equivalent
people who know as much as you they also have some knowledge that they can share with you and
you have some knowledge that you can share with them so kind of like a peer mentoring that's what
it's called that's why it's called peer mentoring so that's like the third mentorship experience
that has been truly truly truly truly helpful in my career so for me my teammates no matter which
team i have been in i have leveraged those peer mentorship relationship i have put in the effort
to develop relationship with my peers whether we go on a coffee chat and have a discussion
about work and project or whether we have like a weekly one-on-one or bi-weekly one-on-one
set up where or one-off one-on-one setup where i'm actually trying to learn about their work
they're they're trying to learn about my work and if there's something that i'm stuck on like i can
ask them maybe they have worked on something similar so this is the type of mentoring that
is called peer mentoring and it's actually all of you have access to it so you should
take advantage of it so what i want you to do if you haven't done peer mentoring what i want you
to do is like set up time with your teammates set up time with your with your classmates like those
are the people they probably know something that you don't know but if you talk to them
and if you ask them they can probably give you some guidance and you can do the same way so it's
like kind of like an equal relationship with where both of you are taking advantage of each other's
knowledge so yeah that's all i wanted to say uh in today's video if this content was helpful for you
make sure to give this video a thumbs up because it will help it with the youtube's algorithm
and subscribe to my channel if you want to hear more about data science tech lifestyle and career
journeys and everything else in between let me know in the comments what was your best mentorship
experience and have you heard of peer mentoring have you taken advantage of peer mentoring
and when it comes down to mentorship what advice do you have for other people all right with that
thank you so much for watching i hope you have a beautiful day and i'll talk to you later bye