Mentorships took the No. 1 spot in LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report.
The subject beat diversity, equity, and inclusion (No. 2), upskilling and reskilling (No. 3), leading through change (No. 6), digital fluency transformation (No. 7), and hybrid/flex work (No. 9), to name a few.
Mentoring’s top ranking doesn’t surprise me, given its proven impact on career development. It’s one of the reasons the Content Marketing Institute launched its year-long mentor program in 2021. (Applications for the 2024 program are available through March 1.)
Benefits of mentoring
Much research on mentoring focuses on the benefits for youth, but the benefits don’t stop after you graduate.
A Deloitte-sponsored study detailed the non-monetary benefits of mentoring, including:
- 87% of mentors and mentees say they feel empowered by their relationship and have developed greater confidence.
- 82% say their mentoring relationships help foster meaningful connections between the mentor and mentee and across departments and the organization.
- 84% say their relationship provides two-way inspiration.
Earlier this century, Gartner conducted a five-year study of Sun Microsystems’ mentorship program. Among the findings:
- 25% of employees in the program saw a salary increase compared to 5% of the workers who did not participate.
- Mentees were promoted five times more often than those without mentors.
But the benefits don’t stop with the mentees. Mentors at Sun were six times more likely to be promoted than non-mentors.
Mentor perspective
Over the years, Vish Khanna added the mentor role to his experience, first as a coach for his child’s sports team and later in his professional world — building marketing teams in a way that requires mentorship. The 2015 Content Marketer of the Year now works as the head of marketing at Shelf.
As he explains, Vish hires marketing makers, not marketing managers. “I’ve got to find the right person and nurture their skillset and ability to play that type of (manager) role, and that demands mentorship,” he says.
For the past two years, he’s also participated as a mentor in the Content Marketing Institute’s program. “A good mentor-mentee relationship is very much peer-based. I just may have a decade more experience.
“I was surprised by how much these conversations with my mentees have made real changes in their day-to-day workflows and how I do my job. I’ve made substantial changes in my approach to marketing based on what I’ve learned from my mentees.”
CMI mentor Deanna Ransom, co-founder and co-CEO of Red Monkey Consulting, agrees. “What I have truly enjoyed is the opportunity to be able to both give and receive from the relationship,” she says.
Vish says he touches base with his former mentees every month or two and sometimes asks for advice because they know Vish’s business challenges really well.
But that strong relationship started with an approach Vish learned from working with many startups and product planning — asking dozens of questions right away to identify the mentee’s challenge(s).
“Run through 20 questions through a pipeline, and you’re going to hit a bunch of holes. It’s just the nature (of things) because not everybody has everything tightened up,” Vish says. “You get there (identifying the challenges) pretty quickly — what’s happening on a tactical and structural level in somebody’s marketing engine — and then figure out.”
But before asking questions or sharing thoughts, Vish and his mentees signed a non-disclosure agreement. He says the document lets both parties speak honestly and openly about their challenges.
Mentee perspective
Vahag Aydinyan, now a senior content marketing manager at 7shifts, was a mentee in the CMI program in 2022. It went so well that he and his mentor, Megan Gilhooly, continued to meet monthly last year.
While Vahag has had some short-term mentors, the CMI program was his first in a formal program. As a then-new content marketing manager who needed to scale a team of one into a team of four, he was eager for a mentor’s input.
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