Pycon.de: Guiding data minds: how mentoring transforms careers for both sides - Anastasia Karavdina¶

Tags: pycon, python

(One of my summaries of the 2025 pycon.de conference in Darmstadt, DE).

Why do you need a mentor when you have a manager? Well, not all managers have that much experience or technical knowledge. And… they might be to busy fighting their own imposter syndrome :-) And especially they have different goals and objectives.

So we might need someone else to help us further in our careers. Yeah: lifelong learning. There’s lots of innovation. Breadth (new tools) and depth (new algorithms, more details).

We need more mentors in tech. Her goal with this talk: becoming a mentor is not so scary and has advantages for yourself.

Definition: mentoring is a professional relationship where a more experienced person (the mentor) supports the growth, development and success of a less experienced person (the mentee).

As a mentor you don’t need to know everything, but with your experience you can often help and guide anyway.

Advantages for a mentee include clarity on your direction, some acceleration of your learning, etc. But the most important one is probably that someone monitors your development, this makes your improvement/learning process more explicit.

Mentorship can take two forms. It depends on the people and the situation which one fits best.

• “Listen and don’t judge”. Help to find a better way. Share your opinion.

• “Structured mentorship”. A goal is defined. The mentor makes a plan and the mentee follows it. Regular meetings for follow-up and course correction. (Eisenhower: plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.)

As a mentor, you should accept that you’re not the right mentor for some people. She’s in the top 2% of succesful mentors on a certain platform, but still 30% of the mentees say she didn’t fit with them. So that’s something that’s just normal.

As a mentor, you have some specific challenges:

• Lot of reflection on your own journey.

• You have to stay up to date in your field.

• You work with people, so it is not just “tech mentoring”: other aspects always crop up.

It has advantages, too:

• Your experience deepens as you have to explain stuff a lot.

• You gain leadership skills. It is different from being a manager, but it might help you get into senior or leadership roles.

• You work with bright people. You might get fresh perspectives.

• Personal fulfillment.

Mentorship can be paid. It can be for free, but she sees a lot of advantages to doing it for money. When a mentee pays, they automatically secure the mentor’s time, which can be an advantage. Paying for focused, personalised guidance is good value for money. As a mentor, your time is valuable. And when the mentee pays, they put more effort in it. If you mentor for money, it makes it easier to treat it as a job, forcing you to make it more sustainable: no more sessions late in the evening or in the weekend.

Note: one of the reasons she started mentoring is because she had gained quite a lot of knowledge, but couldn’t actually apply a lot of it in her job.

Photo explanation: picture from the recent “on traxs” model railway exhibition in Utrecht (NL)