Lessons Learned Mentoring Sketch from Curiosity with Gusto by Felix Harling
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Become a mentor for students

FelixComments(2)

Lessons from my 10-year anniversary

I’ve developed and nurtured a pipeline of more than 30 working students and interns since my start at SAP. I’m proud to observe these Generation Y talents grow in their career and make enormous contributions to their teams.

As a mentor you also learn a lot about yourself e.g. by reflecting why a certain behavior impacted you. Each mentoring relationship is unique; there is no such thing as the typical “Millenial”. Moreover, each mentoring session deserves its own preparation. Additionally, I found it useful to address certain questions in specific phases of the relationship: guidance and expectation management is important during the on-boarding phase, reflection on challenges is useful during the first weeks in a complex work environment, and outlining next steps on the career path is a good one at the end of an internship. I’ve observed that the students who asked the most challenging questions during the mentoring sessions would be the ones whose career has developed fast.

I’m glad that my company SAP offers so many opportunities for students and young professionals.

What is your experience with mentoring?

Felix

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2 thoughts on “Become a mentor for students”

  1. Hi Felix,
    Thanks for sharing your experience with mentoring. Having worked the last few years together with you and many students in our teams, I have learned a lot from you including what it takes to be an excellent mentor.
    One key experience and important reminder for me is the ability to remember my own roots having started as a student in our company, even though this was long ago 🙂 Remembering how I felt as a student, what support I needed and appreciated and how my mentors supported me helps me to adjust my behavior when dealing with young talents.
    I am also very glad that there are continuously lots of opportunties to work with young talents. I constantly have at least two students in my team, we are currently recruiting student candidates in India and just last Friday I had a great session with about 10 young talents who wanted to learn more about our organization and my team and might join us for an internship.
    “No matter where life takes you, don’t forget where you came from.”
    Tim

  2. Hi Tim, same for me, I learnt a lot from the workshops, meetings, and especially the interviews we conducted together. It’s really great how many opportunities SAP offers for students!

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