Proactive technical mentorship enriches engineers in ways they may otherwise not experience.

When the mentee is left to decide all mentorship topics, they will introduce their action-oriented biases into their education. This can breed weakeness as they’ll only grow toward what the business urgently needs, not what it will need, or what circumstances later in their career will need. When the mentor is also looking for topics, the mentee benefits from their experience in unexpected ways, especially if the topics can be tied back to nearby concerns conversationally. It’s critical that the discussions do not turn into lectures.

Personal knowledge management systems help with this by obviating expert blindness by reducing memory’s recency bias’s role in selecting topics.