Something old becomes something new.

A mentor is someone who you can look up to and gain first hand knowledge of whatever it is you are going into. If you are fresh out of college and just got your first entry level position then a mentorship might be needed in order for you to succeed more.

I am sure you developers in the past have been in a situation where you first start off at a company and you are given something and told “do this”. Expecting to be able to be an expert in the ways of coding. I believe companies should create a mentorship where a senior level works with an entry level. Teaching them the framework, or coding cause a lot of times, web companies will have custom-built systems and the F.N.G. will not know exactly how to use it right off the bat. It takes time to learn and time to process.

Entry level jobs are not mid level or just regular positions they are the start to someones career and I believe that putting them with someone who has experience will help them on a solid and stable career path and give them the knowledge of what to expect in the future.

A fresh new developer out of college usually learns the textbook way of learning code, they don’t have any real world knowledge unless they are coming out of the freelance world. Here is one example of me meeting a green developer. She was doing CSS and all of her styling was all over the place. Very unorganized. I told her, look at other style sheets. Look how clean they are, add in comments to specific parts of it. Don’t have your media queries smack in the middle.

Another thing coders will need to learn to get over is asking for help, this profession is a very secluded career that has you focused on a screen and the stereotype that needs to break is all coders know everything and don’t need no help. This is something that has been seen in movies and TV’s but I think that stereotype needs to be broken and developers need to start working more in groups and not competing for number 1 all the time and I think a mentorship at the start of a career can definitely help break that mold.

Now I know companies will say it’s too much time or costs are up, but I think companies need to look past people being numbers as a spreadsheet and I think it would be beneficial to then to mentor people who want to come into the business and not just an intern to throw stuff on but someone who can be shown something to grow and work with. Maybe companies will give it a shot?
See you space cowboy…