Mentoring
Definition of a Beacon Mentor
Beacon Mentors are professionals available for fostering the professional and personal growth of the Beacon Internship interns, using their own experience, expertise and knowledge.
Qualities required of a mentor
In order to provide appropriate mentoring for the Beacon Internship interns, mentors should have the following skills:
- Self Awareness – you should have a good understanding of your own strengths and development needs,
- Accessibility – you should be willing and able to commit sufficient time to your mentee to offer support and guidance,
- Communication – you need excellent communication skills and be able to understand the ideas and feelings of others. You also need to be a great listener,
- Ability to empower – you should be able to support the interns to try out different things or seek wider opportunities, allowing them to contribute in different ways,
- A desire to help others develop – you should understand how individuals develop and haveexperience, either formally or informally, by developing others,
- Inventiveness – be open to new ways of doing things and different ways of working,
- Empathy – Ability to empathise with others,
- Understanding –You should be prepared to try to understand different perspectives, approaches and backgrounds of different mentees.
Beacon Internships allow for flexible working, allowing better access to those who have caring responsibilities or different internship-access requirements. You will have the support of the Beacon Academy throughout. Should it be your first time mentoring, or your tenth, we’ll provide you with training and facilitation to give you everything you need.
As mentors, time commitment expected of you will be variable but nothing taxing! For example, it might be a couple of emails over the year, a catch up over a virtual coffee once a month or however else you would prefer to mentor. You would be mentoring in a way that suits you, and interns might wish to approach more than one mentor for support – so please do not worry about having sporadic availability!