Mentee – Mentoring Meeting Preparation Checklist

This checklist and template (PDF) is to support your preparation for your next mentoring meeting. It is useful for you to reflect on what has happened since your last meeting and plan what to discuss in the forthcoming meeting.

If you are happy to do so, please share the answers to questions 1 & 2 with your mentor a few days before the meeting so that they can also plan how best to support the mentoring discussion.

Finally, there is a post-meeting reflection log to aid your learning following your mentoring meeting.

Mentees responsibilities:

• You are the driver of the mentoring relationship in terms of preparation, meeting arrangements etc.
• Commitment – be reliable, be pro-active, take the initiative – reach-out to your mentor, they expect it.
• Try to implement learning and action points and reflect on how far you have come and what hurdles there might have been (see below). Bring your experiences into the mentoring meeting to share with your mentor.
• Take notes about things that occur in your daily work which seem relevant to your mentoring goals.
• Reflect on any advice you receive and consider what will work for you rather than executing all of it blindly and without thought. Maybe some of the advice will work, maybe not all – learn from what works and what doesn’t work.
• Give feedback to your mentor if the solution they suggest does not suit your personality or situation.
• And acknowledge and discuss any issues that make you feel uncomfortable – including finishing the mentoring relationship with your mentor if it’s not going well i.e. they do not have the required skills to support your goals, or you could not build rapport.

Preparing for the next session

• What has happened since the last meeting?
• Which issues from the previous meeting(s) are still ongoing?
• Are there any new issues? What is on your mind? How could you briefly describe the issue you want to discuss? What context does the mentor need to understand them?
• What would you like to get from your mentor? What would be helpful for you? Including her or his own experiences in regard to a certain issue.

1.    Looking back to the last meeting – what has happened since?

What worked as intended? What didn’t work (yet)? What do you want to get from your mentor in the next meeting?

Conclusions:

2.    Your issue(s) – to prepare and share with your mentor beforehand

3.    Post-meeting reflection log