Mentorship: What young professionals get wrong when picking a career guide

Choosing a career is difficult. Choosing the person whose advice you will use to make those decisions can be even harder. Young professionals today have unprecedented access to career advice. A few minutes on LinkedIn or Instagram can give you opinions on CFA, investment banking, private equity, MBAs, entrepreneurship, and almost every other career path. The problem is no longer access to advice. It is knowing which advice deserves your attention.

1. Don’t confuse visibility with credibility

Social media has changed how we discover mentors. Follower count, production quality, and relatability have become proxies for expertise. But they are not the same thing. A person can be excellent at creating content without necessarily being the right person to guide your career. Similarly, someone with fewer followers may have spent decades developing expertise that is far more relevant to your particular decision.

Someone selling you an easy outcome may be optimising for views, followers or brand partnerships rather than your long-term career. That creates a conflict of interest worth recognising. A simple question can help: Would this advice still be given if there were no product, brand or partnership attached to it? Understand what they have actually experienced, built, or studied that makes their perspective valuable.

2. The right mentor doesn’t give you the answer first

Think about a good doctor. You walk in with a problem. A good doctor doesn’t immediately prescribe a medicine because it worked for someone else. They first ask questions, understand your symptoms and diagnose the underlying problem. Career advice should work the same way.

If someone immediately tells you, “Do CFA,” “Go into investment banking” or “Get an MBA,” without understanding your interests, strengths, financial circumstances, and long-term objectives, they may be giving you a correct answer to the wrong question. A mentor’s job is not to choose your career for you. It is to improve the quality of the decisions you make about your career.

3. Experience matters, but context matters more

There is another mistake young professionals make: assuming that someone’s success automatically makes their advice universally applicable.

It doesn’t. People often give advice based on the stage they are in today. Someone who has achieved financial security may tell younger people not to work too hard, sacrifice too much, or take unnecessary risks. But that same person may have worked extremely hard, sacrificed sleep, comfort or family time, or even worked away from their family in another country because the pay was higher when they were building their career.

Their current advice may be right for their current stage. It may not be right for someone who is 20 or 25 and still building financial security, a career or a better future for their family. That is why context matters.

Follow people who give you long-term advice and make you work harder. Unfollow people who make you spend more, whose opinions can be bought through paid partnerships, or who encourage poor values and shortcuts.

This doesn’t mean sacrifice is always the answer. People have different goals and circumstances. Some may consciously sacrifice for years to improve their family’s standard of living or create better opportunities for the next generation. Others may choose balance or flexibility. Before accepting advice, consider your income, wealth, family situation, responsibilities and what you want from life. Then ask whether the person’s experience is relevant to your situation.

So don’t just ask, “Has this person succeeded?”

Ask, “Is their experience relevant to where I am and where I want to go?”

4. Look for depth, not just relatability

Relatability is useful. It makes advice easier to understand and creates a sense of connection. But it should be the beginning of your evaluation, not the end.

Look for people who can explain why something works, not just what you should do. Look for people who can challenge your assumptions, ask questions you haven’t considered and explain the trade-offs behind a decision.

5. The best advice should change how you think

This is perhaps the simplest test of all. After speaking to someone, do you have another answer, or do you have better judgment? If you need to keep going back to someone for every career decision, they may be creating dependence rather than mentorship.

The purpose of a good mentor is ultimately to make themselves less necessary. Your career will involve hundreds of decisions. You don’t need someone who can make every decision for you.

(The author is the CEO of Leveraged Growth)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aswini Bajaj

[email protected]