21 Jun 2023

Are you ready to mentor?

What you need to know about mentoring and how you can get the most out of sharing your experiences.

  • Sharon Webster

    Senior UX Consultant

    Sharon Webster

Over the last 9 months, cxpartners has sponsored the UX Brighton Mentorship programme which has enabled us to support and encourage the careers of brilliant UX professionals.

As part of it, we were keen to get some mentorship relationships going and myself, Nicola Pritchard and Kate Grant all jumped at the chance to get involved. It was a fantastic programme, and a great opportunity to meet others in the industry.

Now the UX Brighton Mentorship programme has come to a close for this year, it’s a great chance to reflect on mentoring and how much can be gained from it.

A photo of a woman stood at the front of the room presenting from a big screen.
The UX Brighton Mentorship Closing Party

Defining mentoring

What does mentoring mean to you? The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it as “the act or process of helping and giving advice to a younger or less experienced person, especially in a job or at school”. This feels limiting to me, and so I prefer “a mutually beneficial partnership” which can be found repeatedly with a quick Google search.

It’s easy to think you’re not ready to mentor, because you don’t have enough expertise yet. However we all have very different experiences, and mentoring enables us to share these to help others and ourselves develop.

Who can mentor?

In short, anyone with experience! It doesn’t have to be someone with “senior” in their job title. People in their first job have lots to offer those who are studying and may ask how to get into a workplace once they’ve graduated. It may be that you have lots of experience in a particular area, and can help others develop their skills in this.

If you want to know what sort of skills and qualities are needed to mentor, a quick Google brings up search results that are strikingly similar to those needed to be a UXer. Reflective listening, empathy, respect, honesty, positivity and love of learning are all so important in our everyday jobs, as well as mentoring. There’s so much overlap, that we’re in an ideal position to use the skills we have and develop them further by mentoring.

A photo of 14 people sat clapping at the UX Brighton Mentorship Closing Party
The UX Brighton Mentorship Closing Party

Cost of mentoring

This may all sound good so far but what’s the cost? Well, essentially you need to commit time. The UX Brighton Mentorship scheme asked people to commit to one hour per month. My mentee and I decided half an hour every other week would work best for us, and I looked forward to our regular chats via Google Meet. If we were closer geographically, it’d have been great to have met face to face, however our virtual catch-ups weren’t disadvantaged by this.

Benefits of mentoring

Hopefully by now your interest is piqued, and you may wonder what’s in it for me? It’s a chance for everyone to grow including yourself – mentoring really helps you understand your own expertise and how much you know. Imposter syndrome is common in our industry, yet mentoring really helps to validate your own experience so far. When someone else learns from your knowledge, it’s hard to question your own abilities.

You also get to meet fantastic people. UXers are rarely uninterested in other people, that’s one of the reasons why we do this work in the first place. The chance to get to know others helps with networking and building relationships.

A photo of 7 people with their hands up, smiling. Julia, Kate and Sharon are on the right
The UX Brighton and cxpartners team

We’re lucky to have a community for UX and mentoring really makes this better for everybody, as we all learn from each other. My mentee from UX Brighton shared this thought about her experience:

The big takeaway was that there are different roles within UX and a space for everyone depending on their strengths, areas of interest and experience. And that our best work will come if we have a diverse selection of voices being involved.

This really sums up to me why mentoring is so important. We know we can work better if we work together.

Finally, I hope you’ll answer “yes” when asked if you’re ready to mentor – take the chance to mentor and use it as a learning opportunity for yourself and others. If you want to find out more about mentoring, drop me an email at sharon.webster@cxpartners.co.uk.

If you are interested in signing up to the UX Brighton mentorship programme, either as a mentor or a mentee, you can do so here or get in touch with Annie Marie at anniemarie@uxbri.org. I really enjoyed mentoring through the programme and highly recommend getting involved!

Learn more about Are you ready to mentor?

Reach out to Sharon Webster

Senior UX Consultant

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