My (Victoria) first full-time role after completing my Ph.D. in world history combined teaching with administration; I suddenly had to oversee a curriculum, manage instructors and teach several classes. I found myself wishing I had formal training in these areas—though I had taught a handful of times during my Ph.D.. Later, as I moved into roles supporting postdocs and graduate students, I heard experiences that mirrored my own, a sense of being underprepared to take on roles with teaching and leadership responsibilities.
It was only as I started guiding others that I realized I had drawn on my experiences as a mentor and mentee to navigate these new professional areas. Some of the experiences I drew on were examples of successes, for instance, when I coached an undergraduate who was struggling. Others represented failures, whether it was the experience of feeling wholly unsupported by a mentor or the time I had avoided a difficult conversation that could have helped my own mentee. Â
Similarly, when I (Jovana) stepped into my administrative role working with students, faculty and administrators, it required skills that were beyond those taught/discussed/modeled in my Ph.D. in education program. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. However, the more I worked on preparing myself for the requirements of my job, the more I realized that I already learned from my mentors how to guide, lead, collaborate and push back when necessary. Seeing the graduate school dean advocate for me and other students taught me how to do the same for my own students. My academic adviser’s diplomatic way of working with my dissertation committee modeled for me how to navigate conversations with different stakeholders. And finally, being asked by my supervisor to do too much taught me to push myself out of my comfort zone and have the necessary conversation about boundaries.
In your own educational experiences, you may or may not have the opportunity to engage with resources in areas that may be important to your next career step, such as teaching, management and leadership. However, you likely had mentors and have been a mentor to others, either informally (anything from helping a fellow student learn a skill to welcoming new students in your program) or formally (as a teaching assistant, peer mentor or in other capacities).
In our roles supporting graduate students and postdocs in their professional development, we see how these populations learn much from mentorship, including:
- How to articulate their values,
- How to align expectations with others whose priorities are different than their own, and
- The importance of a sense of belonging for themselves and those they work with.
In our previous essay, we shared advice on how to translate your teaching experience into skills such as project management and problem-solving, which can support you in a variety of potential roles inside and out of academia. Here, we continue the same thread and offer strategies for how to identify and translate skills developed through mentorship in pursuit of roles that emphasize teaching, management and/or leadership.
Communication
As a mentor or mentee, you likely presented your ideas and work to your mentor or served as an audience for your mentee. Effective communication to a variety of constituents is an essential part of teaching, leading and managing. Accordingly, drawing on your experience communicating in a mentoring relationship can help you demonstrate how you would be able to engage those who have different skill levels, varying amounts of experience and a variety of priorities.
I (Victoria) drew on my experience as a mentee in developing my communication approach. I realized that mentoring meetings were far more effective when I identified my goals for them and started documenting an agenda and a summary after meetings—otherwise these meetings felt meandering. I have adapted this insight in my management of staff (e.g., by encouraging a supervisee to create our meeting agenda, sharing the task of documenting next steps, etc.).
A further aspect of mentorship communication is giving and receiving feedback. A good mentor ensures a mentee receives regular feedback to help them reflect on their work and their learning and, in turn, invites the mentee’s feedback on the mentor’s support and the work itself. Applying this to how you’d manage others may mean simply scaling to your new context to articulate how you’d use a regular exchange of feedback to build trust.
As for teaching, you can mirror your mentoring approach by inviting feedback throughout or at key checkpoints during the semester to make adjustments in real time rather than waiting until end-of-semester evaluations. Additionally, inclusive teaching approaches encourage providing students with regular feedback on their learning. Your experience mentoring others and giving them feedback on their performance can assist you in offering transparent feedback on strengths and areas of growth for your students.
If your next career step is taking you outside academia, you can use these same principles with those you supervise. I (Jovana) make sure IÂ meet individually with those I supervise and talk about work and their overall well-being, workload and life-work balance. Because of the power dynamics that inevitably exist, I also ask my own supervisor to check in occasionally with those I supervise to ask them how they are doing, and how they feel about work and working with me.
Promoting Independence, Self-Efficacy and a Sense of Belonging
An important part of the mentoring relationship is promoting independence and self-efficacy in the mentee. Reflecting on how you scaffold a mentee’s development to support them in taking on their own project can help you envision leading a course, team or unit. For example, you can articulate how you would scaffold learning in your classroom, perhaps breaking down a final project into assignments handed in throughout the semester. As a manager or leader of a large project, you can consider how you would invite your colleagues to identify strategies and steps toward completing aspects of the project effectively, independently and with confidence.
In a mentoring relationship, a mentor also serves as a critical resource for a mentee’s sense of belonging; they are a primary point of reference for a mentee to understand their context and their role within it. A mentor works to understand a mentee’s expectations for their role and their professional and personal goals as part of helping them achieve their next career step. The mentor can crucially welcome the mentee’s lived and learned experiences and offer perspectives on their goals, the achievability of those goals and what the mentee needs to do to make progress in the right direction. Whether you have experienced this as a mentor or mentee, you likely can draw on your experiences to formulate approaches to support someone feeling included so that they can be successful. Similarly, you can translate this into how you would create a learning or professional space in which everyone can thrive.
The Power of Reflection
The reflection we are encouraging throughout this essay includes reflection on mediocre or negative mentoring relationships—as these, too, can help you articulate the kind of teacher and leader you want to be. For example, in a teaching position I (Jovana) held, I had a supervisor who micromanaged absolutely everything and everyone. While it was overall a negative experience, I learned what kind of supervisor or mentor I did not want to be and what kind of supervisor or mentor I never wanted to have again.
On the other hand, my supervisor while I was a graduate assistant (and my subsequent boss until her retirement in April this year) and my Ph.D. adviser were both the embodiment of role-model mentors. I learned from them what it means to encourage and inspire those with whom you work through your own work ethic, clearly articulated values and commitment to holding yourself accountable.
In our two essays, we encourage you to reflect on your experiences as a graduate student and/or postdoc to consider how they can be used to envision yourself in your next role. In the frequently high-pressure, high-expectations and stressful timelines of academia, we do not always take the time to intentionally consolidate and ruminate on how much we are learning beyond the specific expertise and content knowledge that is formally emphasized in our graduate studies and postdoctoral training.
But to have navigated higher education, your unit and your mentoring relationships effectively, you have developed skills that make you an amazing future teacher, manager and leader. Here we have explored the ways mentoring experiences can feed into or be translated into these areas and can be correspondingly used when applying to and preparing to start that next role.
