How to Build a Design Mentorship Program
Design mentorship, particularly in the early stages of a career, has no comparable “bang for it’s buck” in terms of helping junior designers grow rapidly. Nor is there an approach nearly as satisfying to foster and observe.
Over the past four years, I’ve had the privilege and honor of starting and refining a mentorship program as a part of Austin Center for Design (AC4D) by matching and coordinating mentorship services between alumni and current students. I have personally seen the results: AC4D graduates consistently place at top corporations and institutions around the country.
If you’re considering launching a mentorship program for design students or junior designers, this post is for you.
We’ll cover:
- How to identify and grow talented mentors for your junior designers.
- How to understand key characteristics of your mentor and junior designer pool, in order to most effectively match them.
- Suggested guidance for the mentorship pair as the program is first established.
- The two challenges you’ll face most commonly and how to ensure mentorship runs smoothly over the duration of your program.
Vamos!
How to identify talented mentors for your junior designers.
Any mentorship program needs people who enthusiastically want to mentor. You probably already have a general idea of a pool of people that you’d want to ask — most typically, these are more senior designers who have an immediate stake in the success of the pool of junior designers.
You may even have specific individuals in mind who you feel are already “naturals” who are coaching younger designers off the sides of their desks in addition to carrying their standard workload.
How many junior designers you have in need of mentorship will help dictate how you reach out. Asking individuals directly to participate as a mentor is a more personal and nuanced route, but is one that may be less time effective than just a simple survey to a larger group.
Given the unique time demands on everyone’s schedule, surveying may also be an opportunity to capture levels of desired mentorship activity in order to slot individuals who want to coach, but don’t have the time required to actively mentor a junior designer.
Once you have an initial list of individuals who are interested, you can begin a more rigorous process of reviewing potential mentors’ fit to mentor your unique set of junior designers — ideally this is done by a smaller team of folks who know both mentors and junior designers, in order to select for best fit based on experience, desired focus, communication/meeting preferences, and time available.
Asking the right questions in order to support a great match.
Finding the right fit between your mentors and junior designers is the most important task that you execute on, setting the stage for a solid working relationship between both that will reduce your time on mentorship related tasks. If you pair individuals without asking for more details about what each side hopes to gain out of process, there is a high likelihood of that mentorship failing; which unfortunately, I’ve both seen and been a part of in my early days as a mentor.
Can you commit to meeting one time per week?
Assuming decent human beings and a willingness to teach (and learn), probably the single most important driver of a successful mentorship engagement is the willingness by both in a mentorship pair to show up — to pick a weekly schedule that works for them, and stick to it.
Junior designer: What do you want to focus on most?
This question gets on the content that the junior designer most wants to master. In terms of the design process, there are generally two camps that junior designers can pick: research & strategy, or design execution. It’s also common for junior designers to say “I don’t know, everything”. This is an acceptable answer too — you’ll just need to a have a generalist in your mentor stable.
Junior designer: What type of environment do you see yourself in after?
There are both standard and non-standard paths for junior designers coming out of a design education program — but this question can easily be adopted to the context of a specific corporation. Answers should at least contain “I want to do [type of design] in a [agency/in-house] environment,” and ideally contain as much specificity as the junior designer is aware of. Understanding why they indicate this response is just as important so that you (or the mentor) can correct misconceptions of certain types of work or environments.
Mentor: What type of junior designer do you want to most coach?
Mentors likely have their own ideas of the individuals they would most like to mentor based on their own personal experiences or early struggles rather than just their design discipline. That should be considered alongside current expertise when considering a match.
Based on a matrix of responses from mentors and junior designers, start making matches. Then work with a team to evaluate and recommend changes as needed.
Providing Guidance for Mentorship Program Members.
It’s not uncommon for the mentors you’ve selected to be inexperienced — sadly, mentorship remains an afterthought in many jobs and organizations; whatever happens is generally ad hoc. So, some additional tips are usually welcomed by mentors.
The Introduction
Set clear expectations from the first introduction between mentors and junior designers. When introducing both (either in person or via an email template such as the one below) indicate why individuals were matched — what is the junior designer looking for, and how is that mentor positioned to help him or her achieve those goals?
Set the stage for how often communication is expected, and create a clear next action for the mentor to reach out to the junior designer.
Build trust before critique
Advise your mentors and junior designers to spend the first meeting just getting to know each other’s life stories. Just have a beer (or topo, tea, etc.). This is an easy way to establish some common ground and empathy for each other. It also makes critique that comes later easier to process. As trust is established, it becomes clear that feedback is about work, not the individual.
Set quarterly goals
While a junior designer may have large scale goals that they hope to accomplish “some day” or at the end of the program, mentors generally have a much better sense of the sequence of progression that can lead to accomplishing those goals. Have mentors and junior designers discuss realistic quarterly (or shorter) goals along the way towards mastery of a specific skill, or placement at a particular job.
Ongoing communication and organization
Advise mentorship pairs to establish a standing meeting invite at the location of their choice for in-person sessions. Even more basic — does the mentor and junior designer prefer text, phone, email, or some combination of them? Note and implement a communication system that works for both.
Ongoing critique
Demand that work, at any stage or fidelity, be brought to a design mentorship session. Remind mentors and junior designers that critique is fundamental to growth as a designer; simply showing up to talk shop can help on the emotional support side of mentoring, but does not help the junior designer learn to be a better designer. Showing, instead of just telling, helps establish a level of objective truth, and ensures that the problem solving approach being employed is apt.
Share outside of meetings
I generally advise that mentors share “one something” per week outside of actual meetings related to discussions that occurred during the weekly meeting. For example, “one something” might be a link to a news story, blog, upcoming design conference, reference portfolios, etc. This helps the junior designer by providing additional material they can chew on and grow from, and demonstrates thoughtfulness — further improving critique and conversations each week.
Periodic nudging
If you’re running the program yourself, it’s on you to check in with each mentorship pair to make sure they have the support they need to be successful. For example, a junior designer might go AWOL — it’s on you to reach out to them and understand why this is happening. Maybe the program + work + relationships is making them slip; maybe the match wasn’t actually as appropriate as initially thought.
Another reason to check in is to query how the program itself is going. If you’re just starting up, there may be unique aspects to your culture and context that need to be addressed through program iteration. These points can be identified through informal discussions or more formal surveys — up to you, depending on the size and location of your teams.
Core challenges and how to address them.
Lack of commitment
This can come from either the mentor or the junior designer. Ideally, you’ve already set the expectation from the start around needing to meet once per week — but people can still slip up given other demands on their time.
If you find this happening, address it immediately. There’s nothing more damaging. That means, as needed, switching out mentors; figuring out a different time and place for the pair to meet; or just adding additional transparency mechanisms or reminders for both that make their performance or dependability clear to others that decrease the likelihood for missing sessions.
Lack of, or mismatch of, talent
A common occurrence is that you don’t have mentors with the experience that your junior designers expect. Ask that your mentors be honest with their capabilities and suggest that they direct junior designers to those with other expertise in certain situations that require additional input or skill; or invite another “guest mentor” to the mix on certain meeting days.
This will prove to the junior designer that the mentor has their best interests at heart. Even if the mentor isn’t an expert in certain skills or have certain experiences, he or she can leverage networks to enrich the junior designer’s experience along the way.
Final thoughts.
The difference between good and great is often one to two iterations. Providing feedback through a trusted mentorship relationship is often enough to propel junior designers to more thoughtful solutions. Over time, this guidance can bring exponential growth to junior designers and serious dividends to your organization.
