Topics for meetings
Mentoring is primarily based on the actor's own needs. The basic themes of the discussions support the career design of the actor and vary from identifying strengths and weighing alternatives to developing skills.
Ideas for discussion topics
Career design
- Identifying strengths
- Clarification of values
- Ideation of different career paths
- Balancing professional and other identities
- Impact of working career
- Lifelong and lifewide learning
- Meaningful career and work
Themes related to studies
- Course choices
- Completing studies
- Thesis topics
Working life skills
- Skills and capabilities needed for working life
- Management skills and management development
- Communication in workplaces
- Problematic situations in working life and how to tackle them
- Dealing with stress
- Learning from failure
- Meeting different people in the work community
- Teamwork and the necessary skills
- Supervisor-subordinate relationship, supervisor skills, subordinate skills
- Adaptation to the work community
- Work-life balance
- Interaction situations and negotiations
Information on working life
- Salary requests and negotiations
- Considering different jobs and functions
- Doing case-based project work and following the right project in the mentor's work community
- Researching a certain field/subject area and gathering realistic information about the development of the field
Transition into working life and networking
- Recruitment channels, companies' recruitment processes, what things are sought from graduates in recruitment
- Making contacts, getting to know people in the industry
- Familiarisation with the mentor's workplace, visits to industry organisations with the mentor
- Criteria for choosing a job
- Career transitions (e.g. from academia to industry)
Other topics
- Building an international career
- Entrepreneurship, freelance work
- Ethics of working life, working life rules
- The position of minorities in working life
Mentor, Aalto University Mentoring ProgrammeThink about what you want to know and what kind of support you need. Make a list of topics you want to talk about for each session.
6 ideas for mentoring meetings
The core of the mentoring programme lies in the one-to-one meetings between the mentoring pair. On this page, you will find ideas for six mentoring meetings.
Tips and tools for mentoring