Getting a Mentor: Is it Worth It?

I’ve learned a lot in the last year. In April 2018 I coded a small project called “MentorCruise”. Since then, 130 mentors have registered, 400 mentorships were formed and 2,000 people signed up. Time to look back.

Our mentors are directed at people in Tech, so it has always been interesting to see why people are signing up for mentorship.

Our assumption has always been that mentees are going to be students — looking to start their career in Tech. But the reality is quite different.

• Around 1/3 of people are simply looking to learn a new skill or have a mentor at hand.
• About 20% of people are professionals, looking to change careers (more often than not, from sales/marketing to coding) with the help & network from a mentor
• Only 20% of mentees are students or new grads!

For us, it has always been important to make sure that mentorships start and end with a goal. This makes it easier for us to talk about the question: Is mentorship truly worth it?

Is it Worth it?

Turns out, usually it’s very difficult to answer that question. Since our mentorships are mostly paid, we do need to answer it though — and this is how we do it.

The number one rule is to set a goal upfront. That could be:

• Learning a new skill
• Making a career change
• Switching jobs
• Surviving uni / enter the workforce

Amongst others. When the mentorship ends, we ask again: Did you reach your goal? A sample from our results shows great starting results:

• 14 out of our 30 last mentees said, that they reached their goals and were satisfied
• 6 out of 30 mentees said, that they only temporarily paused their mentorship and plan to come back once their time allows it
• Only 4 out of our 30 last mentees said that they’re not satisfied, due to communication problems, timezones issues or missed expectations.

One day, we hope to shift this quota to the first point even more, but in the meantime, we’re really happy that roughly 50% of mentees found that their mentorship was well worth it.

While non-formal mentorships aren’t measured as easily, we really hope that we could motivate you to go out and find a mentor soon. If you have difficulties, just let us know — we have a lot of them!