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OPINION
Your employees’ mentoring experience can weigh heavily in determining whether your firm is a great place for them to work or not. Successful approaches to mentoring
I recently took Zweig Group’s Best Firms To Work For employee survey, which includes some great questions about firm mentoring programs. It reminded me that mentoring is important, and the employees’ experience with it can weigh heavily on determining if your firm is a great place to work or not. As a branch manager who has been leading staff in some capacity for about 10 years, I’ve learned some lessons over the years about mentoring.
Scott Ratterman, P.E.
To mentor is to advise or train someone to grow their skills. The role of the mentor, the benefits of the relationship, and the expectations all need to be customized to each individual or scenario. Ask: What’s the end goal? Everyone needs a mentor on their first day of starting a job. Whether it be fresh-from-college engineer-in- training or an experienced P.E. who has moved over from another firm, mentoring is required. The new hire with years of experience likely doesn’t need as much mentorship for technical skill set functions, but someone needs to onboard them into the systems, processes, and culture of the firm. But more often, when I think of mentoring, I gravitate toward the mentoring of a less experienced engineer. Most of the new hires at our firm come right out of
college. They may have worked a summer internship, but other than that they have hardly any experience working in a professional environment. Coming from a firm with about 70 employees spread across six offices, here’s my recommended approach to mentoring: ■ Have a plan. Especially if you are a smaller firm, onboarding an entry-level team member can result in failure if there’s no mentor to take the lead. ■ The branch manager assigns a team leader, project manager or themselves to be the go-to for the new team member.
See SCOTT RATTERMAN, page 8
THE ZWEIG LETTER JULY 22, 2024, ISSUE 1546
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