Most mentoring is teaching. You explain something, they try it, you look at the result together.
That is useful and it is also the easy half.
The half people forget is introductions.
Think about how your own career actually moved. Not the tutorials you finished. The person who mentioned your name in a room you were not standing in.
Somebody did that for you. You may not even know who.
If you are mentoring someone, you can be that for them, and it costs you an email.
Here is the thing about junior engineers. Their network is almost entirely people at their own level, all of whom are also junior, all of whom know roughly the same things.
Yours is not. You know the person who runs infrastructure. You know someone at a company they would love to work at. You know the one human who understands the payments system nobody documented.
Those connections are ordinary to you. To them they are locked doors.
So open one occasionally.
When they hit a problem outside your depth, do not just say you are not sure. Say you know who is, and then make the introduction properly.
Not a name dropped in passing. An actual message, with a sentence about who this person is and why they are worth talking to.
Bring them into conversations they have not earned an invitation to yet. Let them sit in the meeting and listen. Say their name when good work gets discussed and they are not there.
And introduce them sideways, not only upwards. The peer at another company who is solving the same problem is often worth more than the senior person who is too busy to reply.
Do this and something quiet happens. They stop being a person you teach and start being a person who is known.
Being known is what turns skill into opportunity. Skill alone just sits there.
You cannot give someone a career. You can absolutely give them the three or four relationships that make one possible.
Teach them things, yes.
Then hand them the room.
– Asael Shinder
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