Article by Daljit Bamford, Chief Customer Officer at Revolent Group
When you’re in the business of creating incredible Salesforce talent, developing a course and teaching potential candidates simply isn’t enough.
The best talent creators do more than just get their candidates started with the learning—they provide a network of professionals, resources, and support to help them develop into the next generation of cloud superstars.
A huge part of this, and one we’ve seen major success with at Revolent, is a great peer-to-peer mentorship program. Mentoring is often seen as most valuable at the start of a career, or when trying something new, like the responsibilities of a new promotion. However, a mentor can add genuine value all the way through your career, not just at the start of new things.
When thinking about how we could support our trainee Salesforce Developers (Revols), we opted to create a mentoring program for a few key reasons:
- We wanted to give people the opportunity to learn from real-life experience, not just the teachings of our course. Mentors can guide and support individuals to greatness, using their own real-world experiences to help mentees overcome challenges they face in an actual working environment, not just in the classroom.
- We wanted to build a network where people support each other to greatness. In the real working world, nothing is done in a vacuum. Has someone created an excellent internal resource to help with a process in your team? Chances are, that’ll be shared around, to improve team productivity, not held back for the sake of propriety. Mentorship can do the same thing, but on a bigger scale. Facing an issue your mentor hasn’t experienced before? It’s likely they can point you in the direction of someone who has. All the while, every new interaction between mentors, mentees, and other contacts, helps each individual build up a portfolio of contacts within their industry, to help them in the future.
- We wanted to encourage passion, and genuine interest in the work itself. While it may sound small, you’d be surprised by how useful a mentor/mentee can be in terms of generating enthusiasm and passion for things which can seem less engaging when you’re working on them in isolation. When looking at a new problem or idea together, it’s no longer just a procedural thing, it’s a discussion. And genuine, meaningful discussions about how a project should be done encourage innovation, and inspire people to try new, exciting ways to solve problems. When people work on things collectively, work goes from being ‘just a job’ to something more meaningful to the individual.
Ultimately, mentorship can have and incredible impact on a person’s career. Mentors guide and support individuals to greatness all the way through their career; from small things like helping to improve confidence, or overcoming new challenges; to bigger picture impacts like inspiring someone to truly love the work they do, or to become a mentor for a new entry into the ecosystem in the future.
About the author
Daljit has worked in the technology sector for 19 years and joined the Board of Directors at Revolent Group in July 2020 from her previous role as Chief Customer Officer (UKI) at Salesforce. At Revolent Group, Dal uses her nearly-two decades’ experience in tech to foster client relationships and enrich the customer experience across the business.
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