Design your career
How career design thinking can help you deal with unpredictability and change
Topics and tools for mentoring 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. The purpose of these ideas and tools is to support the mentoring process and the preparation of your meetings.
Ideas for discussion topics
- 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
- Course choices
- Completing studies
- Thesis topics
- 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
- 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
- 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)
- Building an international career
- Entrepreneurship, freelance work
- Ethics of working life, working life rules
- The position of minorities in working life
Tools for mentoring
The purpose of these tools is to support the mentoring process and the preparation of your meetings. You can pick topics that best support the goals of your process and plan the meetings around them. Each tool includes a short introduction and an exercise or reflection task.
Question assumptions
What are the assumptions you guide your career decisions by?
Imagine possible futures
How to avoid WYSIATI on your career path
Build on your strengths
Designing your career based on your strengths enhances your success and wellbeing
Clarify your values
Values serve as guide posts on your self-directed career path
Create your narrative
How to connect the dots of your career
Prepare for the future of work
What are the implications of the transformation of work and how can you deal with them?
Build holistic wellbeing
The increasing demands and continuous changes at work call for a proactive approach to wellbeing
Cope with overload
How to create a balance between the demands of a job and your own resources
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