According to Randy Elmo’s article in Talent Management Magazine,
“Millennials have grown up in an environment with highly involved baby boomer parents, passionate teachers and other influential authorities telling them that mentoring is vital to a successful professional career. As a result, arguably more than any other generation, millennials are more conscious of mentoring’s role in navigating their careers and accelerating skill development”.
Mentoring is important to Gen Yers but not in the traditional ways we have done so in U.S. business.
According to Phillip Antonelli, learning strategist at Xerox Corp, “Millennials reject the idea that one person is capable of assisting in their growth and development,” he said. “One can hardly blame them — modern business is extremely complicated and consistently evolving. Who can reasonably expect that a single person has all the answers?” Having grown up using social networks and mobile devices to crowdsource information and wisdom, millennials are most likely to seek a broad array of learning relationships to support them at work. Today, millennials have shaken things up again. For them, mentoring is collaborative, networked learning that includes many people. It is a process where they use technology to connect with people across an organization so they can share knowledge and skills, and solicit advice and opinions. They use it as a way to provide practical context to their daily work.
Xerox’s Antonelli said that unlike previous generations, “Millennials reject the traditional mentor/protégé relationship.” Instead, they will engage in mentoring to gain knowledge and address development needs on an ongoing, just-in-time fashion by “seeking out many people to assist them with their career growth and establishing ties with peers and mentors who can help them perform a current task or solve an immediate problem. As a result, their learning networks tend to be informal and social in nature and are governed by mutual need and reciprocity rather than someone in the HR department.” Employers will need to embrace this new modern mentoring in order to create a cross-generational approach to learning and development.