Symbiotic mentoring relationships

I joined the APM mentoring scheme (see how you can get involved with mentoring on the APM website) from its inception in early 2022, as I wanted to give back to the APM and the profession — this was certainly one of the best and personally most fulfilling ways of doing so.  

Some of the benefits I've found from joining the mentoring programme include: providing a break and change from the day-to-day job and stresses of delivering the projects I work on, which is something I feel is important — getting that balance in your project career will help to keep you fresh, stimulated and engaged. I also feel it helps maintain your mental health (especially as more of us are working in greater isolation and remotely from our teams since the pandemic), so it’s good to establish relationships with other people from different spectrums across the project profession. I’ve also used the mentoring relationships to develop myself — by learning new lessons from professionals in the different sectors that I mentor and applying these to my current projects, so it’s often become a ‘reverse mentoring’ relationship. 

The experience also led me to mentor a group of new graduates at Turner & Townsend, who competed in the 2023 APM South Wales and West of England project management team challenge. This helped develop a group of super keen and enthusiastic graduates who went from being completely raw and new to project management, to forming a close knit highly effective team, going through the ups and downs typically faced in high pressure projects. These achievements culminated with them being shortlisted for the final in May 2023 (see Ninth SWWE Project Management Challenge Competition: Finals and Awards Night 2022/23 (apm.org.uk) link), where they narrowly missed out winning the competition. Not only did I get a great sense of pride from mentoring this team, but it also helped to further my development — learning how to best tailor and adapt my mentoring approach for 5 different individuals in the team, as well as providing a useful refresher of the updated 7th edition of the APM Body of Knowledge!   

To give you an idea of the range and type of support I’ve been asked to provide whilst being an APM mentor, I'll break it down into the below chart (as all project managers love a bit of data analysis!), so of the 15 professionals I currently or have mentored over the last two years, the breakdown is: 

 

 

I really would recommend any project professional, regardless of the position or experience, to get involved in mentoring — whether this is as a mentor or mentee.  

 

You may also be interested in:

• Celebrating 12 months of the APM Mentoring Programme
• Qualifications and training
• Volunteering with APM