When most people hear the word ‘mentoring’ they probably think of something like troubled teens breaking windows, or take your daughter to work day, or some medieval apprenticeship in axe smelting. Or maybe a couple junior partners ensconced in wing-backed chairs sipping vintage chardonnay while talking about penetrating market share. But they don’t usually conjure up images of themselves, at least not concrete ones. Mentoring has become a chore, a vehicle to log community service or pad a resume or atone guilt.
But for many young professionals, the familiar path for attempting to develop a meaningful career goes something like school, internship, cold calls, email solicitations, happenstance job postings, and submitting applications like buying lottery tickets. Getting a job you actually really want, or honing useful experiences in a field, is about as deliberate as falling through a trap door. It kind of either happens or it doesn’t. Harvard either sends you a big manila folder or a wafer-thin legal envelope. That principal either calls you for a second interview or fades into utter oblivion. You show up the first few weeks of work and either realize you found something that genuinely makes you happy and productive, or you realize you didn’t need the last 8 years of school to answer the phone when it rings or discuss 1970s cultural trivia with co-workers you can’t stand. It kind of just happens. And in the 21st century, innovations and widgets and databases designed to mute this uncertainty and randomness seem to just accelerate it. Now instead of a few job postings we’re not sure we’re interested in, we can see a thousand, or instead of five bosses we don’t know we want, we can network with fifty. But going in for that first face to face in some downtown office or stately board room while being offered free drinks and being peppered with questions still seems just as ice-cold evolutionary as antelope crossing the Serengeti. Degrees and core competencies and letters of recommendation may get you in the door, but you still either sink or swim. It’s all decided usually in matter of minutes or hours, or if you’re lucky days. There is rarely that trial opportunity, an environment that isn’t so clearly and awkwardly motivated by self interest. I want this job, you want to finish the paperwork and successfully close a headhunt, so just try to resist my effusive charm and unrestrained intelligence. The fact is most people think they’re more insightful and unique than they could ever hope to be, and so this shock and awe approach to dream career acquisition usually goes about as well as its military equivalent.
The reality is we can more easily follow a feed of Britney Spears’ daily caloric intake than vaguely describe what it is we want to do every day with job title ‘fill in the blank.’ We develop a better rapport with our cleaning ladies than we do with people we may potentially spend a majority of our waking hours with. Years of school and imagined lives and aspirations and resumes are crushed together in one giant professional particle accelerator, and it either spits out a job you like, or maybe consumes your life as fuel to swallow the universe whole in one giant eternal black hole. We test drive cars but not careers, we rate 30 second youtube clips but not vocations, we try on a pair of slacks at the mall but not a job offer, we scorn Wall Street bonuses but know we just wish it was us on the receiving end. And in these little gaps is where I think there is a role for mentoring. Mentoring can be more than trying to save people from entering the penal-justice system or reduce an uptick in attrition. Mentoring is where droves of teenage aspiring financiers can have a fail-safe environment to test their assumptions, and would be engineers can stress-test career pathways before they commit hundreds of thousands and years of their life. It's where people can actually pick up and hold that big shiny prize they've coveted forever. It's where people can discover what they want and what they like.
There’s a billion gray-haired professionals populating skyrise cubicle farms, slogging through subways in yellow sweat-stained polos, negotiating morning rush hour at the Starbucks drive-thru, sifting through folders of porn on the weekend, who deep down know they want more. And there are at least as many religiously, compulsively anally driven twenty-somethings whose main mental construct is centered around getting a usually painfully generic big break that will deliver them from their current stalled ascent up the career escalator. Seems like supply and demand groping for a market. And rather than unite them in a high-stakes, hire or fire, promote or shelf, judge or patronize, win or lose, zombie dance, how about actually try it, whatever it happens to be. This is why I created Plategro.com. And while I think it has a likelihood of success about the same as an AIG subprime mortgage getting paid back, I think it’s good to dream.
But for many young professionals, the familiar path for attempting to develop a meaningful career goes something like school, internship, cold calls, email solicitations, happenstance job postings, and submitting applications like buying lottery tickets. Getting a job you actually really want, or honing useful experiences in a field, is about as deliberate as falling through a trap door. It kind of either happens or it doesn’t. Harvard either sends you a big manila folder or a wafer-thin legal envelope. That principal either calls you for a second interview or fades into utter oblivion. You show up the first few weeks of work and either realize you found something that genuinely makes you happy and productive, or you realize you didn’t need the last 8 years of school to answer the phone when it rings or discuss 1970s cultural trivia with co-workers you can’t stand. It kind of just happens. And in the 21st century, innovations and widgets and databases designed to mute this uncertainty and randomness seem to just accelerate it. Now instead of a few job postings we’re not sure we’re interested in, we can see a thousand, or instead of five bosses we don’t know we want, we can network with fifty. But going in for that first face to face in some downtown office or stately board room while being offered free drinks and being peppered with questions still seems just as ice-cold evolutionary as antelope crossing the Serengeti. Degrees and core competencies and letters of recommendation may get you in the door, but you still either sink or swim. It’s all decided usually in matter of minutes or hours, or if you’re lucky days. There is rarely that trial opportunity, an environment that isn’t so clearly and awkwardly motivated by self interest. I want this job, you want to finish the paperwork and successfully close a headhunt, so just try to resist my effusive charm and unrestrained intelligence. The fact is most people think they’re more insightful and unique than they could ever hope to be, and so this shock and awe approach to dream career acquisition usually goes about as well as its military equivalent.
The reality is we can more easily follow a feed of Britney Spears’ daily caloric intake than vaguely describe what it is we want to do every day with job title ‘fill in the blank.’ We develop a better rapport with our cleaning ladies than we do with people we may potentially spend a majority of our waking hours with. Years of school and imagined lives and aspirations and resumes are crushed together in one giant professional particle accelerator, and it either spits out a job you like, or maybe consumes your life as fuel to swallow the universe whole in one giant eternal black hole. We test drive cars but not careers, we rate 30 second youtube clips but not vocations, we try on a pair of slacks at the mall but not a job offer, we scorn Wall Street bonuses but know we just wish it was us on the receiving end. And in these little gaps is where I think there is a role for mentoring. Mentoring can be more than trying to save people from entering the penal-justice system or reduce an uptick in attrition. Mentoring is where droves of teenage aspiring financiers can have a fail-safe environment to test their assumptions, and would be engineers can stress-test career pathways before they commit hundreds of thousands and years of their life. It's where people can actually pick up and hold that big shiny prize they've coveted forever. It's where people can discover what they want and what they like.
There’s a billion gray-haired professionals populating skyrise cubicle farms, slogging through subways in yellow sweat-stained polos, negotiating morning rush hour at the Starbucks drive-thru, sifting through folders of porn on the weekend, who deep down know they want more. And there are at least as many religiously, compulsively anally driven twenty-somethings whose main mental construct is centered around getting a usually painfully generic big break that will deliver them from their current stalled ascent up the career escalator. Seems like supply and demand groping for a market. And rather than unite them in a high-stakes, hire or fire, promote or shelf, judge or patronize, win or lose, zombie dance, how about actually try it, whatever it happens to be. This is why I created Plategro.com. And while I think it has a likelihood of success about the same as an AIG subprime mortgage getting paid back, I think it’s good to dream.
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