writing my first mentoring plan

#career #mentorship #networking

I've recently got into a career mentoring program with my local JuniorDev community which runs for 2 months with check-ins every 2 weeks. Being a mentee, I thought it would be helpful for both my mentors and I to list what I want to learn from them and what I want to achieve at the end of the program.

1. Embodying the right mindset

As an IT engineer who have worked on developing and maintaining several systems for my organization, I frequently come across the questions of "How will this help us more than hurt us?" and "Should we do this just because we can?" which returns us to the drawing board of whether a certain implementation would cause more problems than the ones it will be solving.

I've realised that I tend to lose focus and clarity of the problem at hand since distractions are everywhere nowadays. I want to build a mindset that focuses on solving one problem and delivering a solution fast, followed by reiteration practices to make it better and better.

2. Interview and Workforce preparations

Throwing interview prep into the mix, I do lack quite a lot of knowledge about workflows such as scrum or agile, Kanban boards, etc even though I have been working with a few workflows on Jira project boards. I've read that good CI/CD practices are just as important as practicing LeetCode since working with other developers makes up most of the job.

3. Make a decision on the work I want to do / specialise in

As I am someone with plenty of interests, I'm hoping to get some advice on the field of software to be involved in. I'm going to list several of my current interests in tech here based on their priorities:

Writing programs with GO
Web-app and application development
tinkering with IoT devices, Raspberry Pi, ESP32, etc.

Tech stacks I'm most familiar with:

JavaScript
React
GO

I am intending to specialize in application development as the entry for jobs in the field are slightly more open for Junior positions whereas a certain specialization surround my interests such as backend development would require higher levels of experience that I currently don't have. Let me know what you think about this in the comments and if you have any idea what I should try specializing in!

I will be starting the mentorship program in a weeks' time, and I hope to be updating my progress here as well. If you have any advice on mentorships for me, please let me know in the comments as well :)