Can't find a mentor? You could pay for one
Some benefits of paid tech mentorship arrangements
We all know we should get mentorship as engineering leaders, but it can be hard to make it happen. It’s the rare person who feels like they have all the mentorship they need.
Lots has been discussed about finding a mentors and building mentorship relationships — how to identify potential mentors, reach out to them, help them in return, and show them that you are benefitting from their mentorship.
However, despite all the content on this topic, many of us are still left feeling we don’t have the mentorship we need. It’s intimidating trying to spin up an interpersonally-delicate relationship with someone more advanced than yourself, especially on short notice, such as if you are facing a major career decision or transition and you need a mentor’s advice fast.
It’s also hard to know how to start offering mentorship if you feel you have something to offer. Do people just come to you? Some people proactively offer free help, but I’ve found mentor-mentee relationships that come together this way aren’t always a great match. One or both parties might not be discerning enough about whether it’s a good fit, because they are so eager to give or to accept the free help.
My experience getting paid mentorship
A few years ago, I was preparing for an urgent promotion opportunity into management. Someone was leaving the company and someone would be picked in the next week or two to manage in their place. I wanted mentorship — on short notice — about how to best apply for the role and succeed in it if I had the opportunity to serve in it.
I didn’t just want to get responses from an anonymous forum, or even from my existing mentors from my previous company or current company; I wanted in-depth advice and feedback on my thought process and approach — all from someone who had done what I was hoping to do in similar types of companies.
Luckily, I was already familiar with a mentor who could help me with these questions. He had ample experience at many levels of the software management track in small startups. Furthermore, he was available for paid individual mentorship sessions via MentorCruise.
I had met him a few months before through a mock interview, liked his advice on the nock interview, and noticed he offered these mentorship sessions, so getting a qualified mentor to help me with my urgent problem was as simple as going onto MentorCruise and booking a career coaching session with him.
His advice was very helpful, and I did end up landing the promotion into management. I’m not sure what would have happened had I not had the mentorship session, but in some sense at least, the session paid for itself maybe 800x over with its impact on my career.
I’ve booked several more sessions with this same mentor as my career has progressed. It’s nice to know that (so long as he still offers mentorship sessions) whenever I’m facing a certain level of challenge as a manager I can just go book a session with him, do a brain-dump, and get insightful advice from someone who has been there before.
He also gets the reward of seeing my career progress over the time he’s been helping me. I don’t know if any of this would have come together had he not offered formal paid mentorship sessions.
Payment can facilitate mentorship exchanges that wouldn’t happen otherwise
There are many areas of life where it’s good to avoid paid transactions. However, the exchange of money can help to facilitate beneficial trades that wouldn’t happen (or would take longer to come together) otherwise.
For example, in the case of the mentor in my story above, I’m not sure I would have known he was open to mentoring had he not listed his mentorship services on MentorCruise. I don’t think I would have felt comfortable approaching him for a traditional mentorship on the basis of just meeting him once in a mock interview. However, because he offered paid mentorship, getting started as his mentee was as simple as clicking a button.
Some additional advantages of paid mentorship (for both parties):
Helps mentors to show they are open to mentoring
You can set up an account on one of many mentorship services and publicize it. After writing this post, I’m planning to do this myself!
Makes mentoring more immediately rewarding
Most of us are busy, and that can get in the way of good intentions to pay it forward. Mentoring others is always rewarding, but getting paid for it can increase the immediate rewards and might make more people open to mentorship (considering the psychology of immediate rewards).
Reduces the awkwardness of asking for mentorship
Instead of wondering what reach-out message would get them to possibly consider mentoring you one day, all you need to do is to book with them, since they’ve made it clear what they are looking for (their fees and booking arrangement).
Makes the terms of the mentorship clear
You know for how long you will meet, who is helping whom, and what each person’s role is because this is set out explicitly and implicitly through the paid mentorship.
You can focus on yourself in a paid mentorship session
You’ve already taken care of your side of the agreement by paying the mentor for their time, so in the session, you can focus on yourself. You can brain-dump or ask for their advice on your problem and make use the time for your most pressing needs.
Less awkwardness about trying to help the mentor in return
It’s often said that a good way to “pay” for traditional, unpaid mentorship is to help your mentor in return. Maybe you know things they don’t or have a different perspective being younger and earlier in your career.
However, I’ve found that it can be awkward trying to make this work. When I’ve asked mentors what I could do for them, they often just ask me to “pay it forward,” which is a good way to repay them but not immediately actionable.
Trying to offer direct help to potential mentors (e.g., “have you thought of this thing I know a lot about?”) can come across as — and in some sense is — giving unsolicited advice. It can work well in some cases, but it can be a delicate matter to start offering your expertise to someone more advanced in their career than you are.
In general, it can be hard as the mentee to determine exactly what rewards or help will make an unpaid mentorship relationship worth it for the mentor to continue. If the mentorship sessions are paid, that question is very easy to answer.
Easier to get mentorship from people outside of your usual circles
Traditional mentorship relationships often develop naturally with people you work with. My first boss and a former coworker have always been mentors for me ever since I left the company. I also have mentors in my current company.
However, sometimes you want help from someone with a different perspective. Maybe you are targeting a new type of company or industry. Maybe you want to be able to speak freely in a way you couldn’t with people at your current company.
Being able to quickly obtain mentorship with someone far outside your usual circles (who is more qualified for the issue you are facing) through paid mentorship can be extremely helpful.
Can get mentorship quickly
As in my story above, if you need a mentor urgently for a career question (evaluating an offer, getting ready for an interview, handling an urgent problem), booking a paid mentorship session can come in handy if you don’t have existing mentors who are qualified to help.
It’s a step up from asking on anonymous forums
Many people go to Blind or r/cscareerquestions for their urgent career questions. This can be good for simple or obvious questions, but if you have a complicated question with more details than people are likely to read on a forum, or if you need to vet the people giving the advice (you don’t know who is behind the username on forums), setting up a session where you’ll be able to fully delve into your problem with a paid mentor whose credentials are known to you can be very valuable.
Helps to ensure the mentor and mentee value each other’s time
While there are many sites for free mentorship exchanges, payment at some level can help to ensure that the people involved are giving the adequate attention to the mentorship, whether because they want to make the most of the time they (or their company) are paying for or because they want to feel good about being paid for their services and receive good reviews.
Your company might pay for it
Given the business value of mentorship for getting you up to speed and performing well in your role, your company might pay for your mentorship. I think Plato is a mentorship site that companies often pay for their employees to access.
Not a replacement for unpaid mentorship relationships
This is not to say that paid mentorship can or should replace traditional mentorship relationships. Those have several advantages of their own. I wouldn’t want to bring money into my long-standing relationships with former bosses and coworkers. Also there are many great mentors out there who would never offer paid mentorship but who can be great mentors if you’re able to develop that relationship with them.
Paid mentorship simply offers some advantages in terms of speed and ease of getting mentorship going. That said, you still need to vet the people you use as paid mentors, such as through their reviews, LinkedIn, or your experiences with them.
The amount of money exchanged is usually small
Lest we feel too uncomfortable with the idea of transacting money in mentorship relationships — the monetary transfers for paid mentorship (at least on the sites I’ve seen) are usually small in the scheme of things, often comparable to or less than our hourly rates as engineering leaders.
If two people are able to meet up in a more comfortable and relaxed manner if one of them pays the other $75 per call or $300 per month to acknowledge the difference in their experience levels and the direction that the “helping” will be flowing, then why not?
Value of mentorship for engineering leaders
A paid mentorship session might cost less than 0.05% of your gross yearly salary, but the impact on your career can be very large.
Getting help from people who have already done what you are hoping to do can be extremely valuable to your career.
It’s said that each time you are promoted to a new level as an engineering leader you need to learn a new job (something I’ve learned from my own mentor in the story above, actually)! Being able to talk to a mentor who has already gone through this process can help you to make these transitions more easily and provide more value to your employer by onboarding more quickly into your new role.
This is part of why mentorship becomes so important if you are on the engineering leadership track. You might be learning a new job with each promotion, job switch, or growth stage of your company.
Summary and resources
In summary, paid mentorship is an oft-overlooked potential valuable way to get the mentorship you need. When we discuss “how do you find a mentor,” one of the options could be to simply search for a paid mentor.
The way I got paid mentorship (paying a fee per 45-minute session) isn’t the only way. There are also month-by-month agreements for ongoing support, peer mentorship circles, paid forums, fees by-the-minute for mentorship calls, and many other arrangements.
Here are some sites if you want to look for or offer paid tech or engineering leadership mentorship:
MentorCruise - one of the best mentorship sites, with mentors offering monthly support or one-off individual coaching sessions. If you want to offer mentorship, you can apply to be a mentor there.
Plato - monthly fee (paid by the individual or their company) to access mentorship sessions
List of paid coaches for engineering leaders from The Pragmatic Engineer
Engineering Leadership Community Peer Groups - $950 program fee for 1-year membership in curated groups of engineering leaders who meet monthly to mentor one another
Taro - Paid mentorship and career advice forum created by Alex and Rahul of the Tech Career Growth community. Participants are encouraged to ask their company to pay for their membership ($60/month or $29/month if purchased yearly). I joined for a month to check it out, and while the community aspect is still coming together, I was impressed by the quality of the video content (lots of interviews and webinars) and the insightfulness of Alex and Rahul’s answers to forum questions (you basically get mentorship from them as a member).
GrowthMentor - mentors focused on startup growth
Pelion - mentors from top companies
Clarity - mentors available for per-minute fee
There are also some sites for unpaid but nonetheless more formal mentorship matching:
Have you ever used a paid mentorship service? Would you think about offering mentorship as an engineering leader if it was paid? Let me know what you think!
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