9 Concrete Reasons Why Everyone Needs a Mentor at Work

Successful professionals are not born, they are developed. No matter how smart or hard working you might be, you can hardly figure out everything on your own. This is where mentors step into the game to help you make the first moves and give your career a boost.

By definition, a mentor is a person who gives a younger or less experienced individual help and advice over a period of time, especially at work or school. Studies show that over 70% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs because it pays off in performance, productivity, and innovation.

But this is not the only reason you need a professional adviser. On the contrary, there are many other advantages of having a mentor at work and we will discuss the nine major benefits in this post. Let's take a look!

1. A Mentor Gives You Knowledge and Information
The first reason for finding a mentor is obvious - she can give you lots of knowledge and information very quickly. Learning from your own experience usually takes years to figure everything out, but mentors give you the opportunity to compress the process and turn years into months.

Take the college paper help as an example - young content creators don't know the peculiarities of the local market, but more experienced authors help them to understand how students think and expect. Such mentorship quickly turns inexperienced colleagues into serious assignment help professionals.

2. Mentors Inspire and Motivate
Do you know that employees who don't feel recognized when doing great work are almost two times as likely to be job hunting? This is a big issue for young professionals, but not if they have a mentor who follows their work and progress.

Namely, a mentor will always encourage you to do more and praise you for the job done well. You will have more than enough inspiration to work harder because someone is always there to acknowledge your results and give you an additional motive to keep going.

3. They Help You to Identify and Eliminate Mistakes
Young professionals tend to make a lot of beginner mistakes. It's not a surprise, but you can at least try to identify such blunders and eliminate them as soon as possible. Needless to say, this task becomes much easier with the help of your workplace coach.

According to the report, mentoring has been found to reduce turnover intention as well as actual turnover. How come? Well, mentors used to walk in the same shoes and they perfectly understand how you feel and behave, so they can help you to overcome beginner-level errors.

4. A Mentor Helps You to Focus on Good Ideas
New employees almost always come to work with a bucket full of ideas and business proposals. While this is by no means a disadvantage, the fact is that younger people are having a hard time distinguishing between good and bad ideas.

As a more experienced colleague, your mentor can assist you in brainstorming and filtering different proposals. It will help you to focus on good ideas only, thus preventing unnecessary time and energy waste. In other words, you will become more productive and goal-driven.

5. You Can Learn to Fall and Get Up
Making mistakes is something no one can avoid. Nobody can stay sharp and focused 100% of the time, so you can expect to fall from time to time and make blunders that could harm your fragile reputation. This is where a mentor's experience should play a major role because she can teach you how to get up and continue working with even more passion and dedication than ever before.

Jake Gardner, a successful essay writer, believes that learning to get up after falling is one of the most precious lessons a mentor can teach you: “Young individuals take it very emotionally - and they certainly should - but the sooner they realize it's not the end of the world, the easier it will be to move on.”

6. Mentors Promote Professional Discipline
Another important aspect of mentoring is the promotion of self-discipline. It's one of the most significant traits a young professional can develop because it teaches people to work hard and not to give up that easily.

This reason to find a mentor becomes particularly relevant when you know that over 20% of employees jeopardize their jobs because of procrastination. Your workplace advisor will teach you how to plan and prioritize tasks, improve scheduling skills, and save some spare time for unpredicted situations.

7. Mentors Are Trustworthy
When you're just starting a brand new career, you need a trustworthy person to support you and help you make it through the first and most difficult periods. No one can do it better than senior colleagues who understand how you feel and when to give you that much-needed push. A reliable mentor has a wide range of precious traits:

- Professional knowledge to help you understand how the business works.
- Experience with people and organizational processes.
- Soft skills such as interpersonal communication.

8. Mentors Help You with Networking
Speaking of communication and soft skills in general, it is important to point out that mentors can help you with networking. This is fundamental in the early stages of your career because you need to acquire as many professional acquaintances as possible.

Doing so, you will start earning valuable connections that could lead you to new business opportunities. It's not a novelty in the business world - some agencies find most of their employees through wide networks of professional contacts.

9. Mentoring Is a Free Course
Most people claim that nothing comes for free in life, but they are wrong since mentoring won't cost you a thing. Think about it for a moment and you'll realize how great the whole concept really is - you get to learn so many things and gain relevant experiences free of charge. There won't be many opportunities like this one in your life, so make sure to seize it.

Conclusion
Working solo can only get you so far in the early stages of the career, so we definitely recommend you to find a mentor to guide you and give you valuable business-related advice. In this article, we discussed nine concrete reasons why everyone needs a mentor at work. Do you plan to find one?

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Joseph McLean is an experienced project manager and freelance writer. His main focus is professional improvement and self-development. The favorite topics of his posts are education, motivation, and self-growth. Please, do not hesitate to contact him on Facebook.

Opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of WITI.