Mentoring Again

Background

A few years back, I was assigned an Apprentice to mentor. I said I would love to do it, but I questioned why the Senior Developers in the team didn’t have anyone to mentor when it is literally in their job descriptions.

At the time, my manager said that she thought I’d be the best mentor in the team, and if I do it successfully, then that is good evidence I can be promoted.

I think the mentoring went successfully, but I didn’t get a promotion.

Present Day

Fast-forward to the present day: My new manager said that an Apprentice is joining our team, and out of everyone, he reckons I would be the best mentor. If I do it successfully, then that is good evidence I can be promoted.

I said I’d love to do it. This time I didn’t complain about the Seniors not mentoring. I didn’t want to risk my manager reassigning the Apprentice. I have a good feeling my manager will actually promote me, but we will see.

The Future

I had a chat with my Apprentice. He has never done C# before; but it’s vital to our team. We already had a lack of developers – and a lack of skilled ones. Now we have someone who has never seen the program we are working on, and never used the language it is written in. He has come via a bootcamp that taught him basic Web Development, so that’s some wasted training.

This means that I’ll have to spend a lot of time training him, which means my productivity to bug fixes/enhancements will drop. Our team’s productivity was already low, and now we have another member which is actually going to decrease productivity. I hope managers realise this.

I think I’ll have to encourage him to learn as much as he can on his own. I’ve sent him a C# ebook which is pretty comprehensive. He has access to an online training platform to watch in his own time, plus all the rest of the free content on the internet.

This is another topic to write about on the blog. It can document me learning how to teach someone from scratch, and also document funny mistakes he makes.