Mentoring Skills: Definitions, Examples, and Tips

Updated November 4, 2022

Mentorship is an effective tool in the workplace to promote learning, ensure success, and provide great leadership. Developing mentoring skills can help you advance your career and build meaningful relationships with coworkers. Knowing what mentoring techniques are and how to improve your skills can be useful when you're writing your resume or cover letter, or during an interview. In this article, we define and give examples of mentoring abilities with tips on where to seek opportunities to improve your skills and how these abilities can be useful when finding employment.

What are mentoring skills?

Mentoring techniques are the traits and abilities that help you offer valuable leadership to your mentee, which is an individual or group that you're guiding. Mentors may offer guidance to students, employees, and successors. To be an effective mentor, it's important to build a trusting relationship with those who you mentor. This requires a combination of interpersonal, leadership, and technical skills.

Examples of mentor skills

Here are several examples of mentoring skills:

Active listening

Active listening is the ability to hear and comprehend what another says. Mentors use active listening skills to acknowledge the opinions and feelings of their mentees. Using active listening skills may also help your mentee feel more supported. You may use active listening skills to ensure you understand an individual's feelings so that you can provide helpful feedback and guidance.

Communication

Typically, mentors provide mentees with advice, so superb communication skills are necessary. This includes verbal and written correspondence, as well as being able to convey ideas so that others may understand. It's useful for mentors to use non-verbal communication too. When a mentee doesn't understand instruction, they may give non-verbal cues that a communicative mentor could recognize and address by offering clarification.

Leadership

The primary job duty of a mentor is to provide guidance, so it's essential they have abilities relating to leadership. For example, mentors must display honesty, which helps build relationships with the mentees because honesty inspires trust. Leadership skills such as decision-making, creativity, and honesty are useful in strategizing how to prepare lessons for those they mentor.

Interpersonal

The key to mentoring others is building relationships with them. Then a mentor can use the relationship to help their mentee learn and grow. Having strong interpersonal skills, such as dependability and empathy, helps mentors and mentees relate to each other, and the trust they build encourages them to listen to one another.

Education

The ability to teach is vital to the role of a mentor. Using various coaching methods, mentors give instruction, encouragement, and advice to the people they're mentoring, to help develop skills and learn to perform tasks. Mentors have a knowledge base to share and do this by creating hands-on learning activities and giving lectures and instructions.

Assessment

Assessment skills are important to monitor progress and determine how to help the individuals they mentor. Mentors may give tasks or activities for the mentee to complete in order to assess their capabilities and ensure they can apply the knowledge their mentor shares. It's also helpful for a mentor to ask questions so they can offer clarification if their mentees don't understand or struggle with a task. Asking questions is also a useful evaluation for daily progress.

Motivation

When guiding others and providing instruction so they may learn a new skill, mentors can use motivation to maintain positivity and promote a healthy mindset. The ability to motivate mentees enables mentors to offer encouragement that is often needed along the mentees' learning journey. Sometimes the mentee may feel challenged or discouraged, but a great mentor uses motivation to boost morale and persuade their mentee to pursue goals.

Problem-solving

The ability to identify an issue and plan a successful solution is a skill a mentor can use when designing a strategy to teach their mentee, helping their mentee overcome a challenge, or when deciding how to adjust their training method after assessment. Problem-solving is also an important skill for mentors to help others develop because it's applicable to many careers. By demonstrating their ability to solve problems, a mentor can help their mentee develop problem-solving skills.

Technical

Technical skills are special knowledge and abilities used to perform tasks relating to a person's career. Depending on the industry, the technical skills a mentor needs vary. For example, shooting and editing portraits are technical skills for photographers. In order to help their mentee succeed in their career, a mentor must possess technical skills they can help their mentee develop.

Related: 13 Important Mentorship Skills

How to improve your mentoring abilities

Here are several ways that you can improve your mentor skills:

1. Take professional development courses

Taking professional development courses may help you grow your mentoring abilities by teaching you valuable leadership qualities and techniques. Often, professional development courses teach you how to be an effective mentor by teaching you how to provide valuable feedback and meaningful advice. You may take general professional development courses, or you can take a course that focuses on expanding leadership and mentoring techniques. For example, a project management development course or a business administration development course can help you build your mentor skills.

2. Look for leadership opportunities

Seeking leadership opportunities at work and in your community can help give you practice so you can exercise and enhance your mentoring abilities. Consider open management positions at the company where you work and inform your employer of your interest in mentoring. There may be opportunities in your community to mentor, such as becoming a youth leader, starting a club, or coaching a sports team. These positions provide practice in leadership, creativity, problem-solving, and education, so you can improve many mentoring skills.

3. Network and build relationships

Networking to meet other professionals can help develop interpersonal skills so you can be a great mentor. For example, meeting new people requires communication and social skills such as reading body language, active listening, and emotional intelligence. These skills help form relationships with employees that facilitate your mentorship.

Attending networking events is very useful at all stages of your career to help you grow professionally. You meet mentors who can guide and help you advance in your career. This gives you needed experience and provides you with a group of people who you can rely on for advice. Having mentors provides you with examples on how to lead others.

Related: Guidelines on How to Network

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Highlighting your mentoring skills

Here are examples of where and how to highlight your mentoring techniques for employers:

Mentor skills for resumes

Employers value the ability to mentor others because it helps strengthen the workforce by developing talents. It's useful to list leadership or education in the skills section of your resume. You may also list mentoring as a job duty for a previous role.

Another way you can showcase mentoring abilities on your resume is by adding certifications or your attendance to a mentorship workshop in the education portion. Consider certifications that recognize a mentoring skill such as leadership in a project management certification.

Mentor skills for cover letter

Writing about your mentor skills in a cover letter is an effective way to communicate your abilities to your potential employer. Whether you are applying to a mentorship role, mentoring techniques apply in a variety of settings, and highlighting these skills can increase a hiring manager's interest. For example, if you apply to be an engineer, skills such as communication and leadership are useful for this role.

Mentioning mentor skills in your cover letter is important if you apply to a managerial role because often supervisors have a job responsibility to train employees. An anecdote about mentoring someone at a past job in your cover letter reveals your skill set and a friendly personality that employers may prefer in their work environment.

Mentor skills for interview

A job interview is an opportune time to highlight your mentoring skills by sharing examples of how you've mentored others in the workplace. If you interview for a supervisor position, the hiring manager may ask you to describe your approach to mentorship. Highlighting your mentoring techniques could also be useful for non-supervisory positions. It can show that you're a strong leader, can handle responsibility, and are committed to the team's success. Share examples of how you help coworkers or give them advice to demonstrate your mentoring abilities.

Example: "I approach mentorship as a key aspect of strategizing for team success. I feel it's important to build relationships with employees and by doing this, I can establish myself as a mentor. In my last role, my team would communicate their challenges to me and felt comfortable asking for advice. When starting new projects, I always take time to define each task and offer guidance or assistance as the project progresses. With my mentorship, I've seen several employees receive promotions, and they've grown into strong mentors."