Introduction

Hello reader, it’s been quite some time since I’ve written an article. In fact, it’s been almost 2 years. I’ve definitely had some things to say, but I have lacked the motivation. Obviously that has changed (at least for the time being).

SQL Saturday Atlanta

This past weekend, I attended my first SQL Saturday event in Atlanta and I had a blast. I spoke on Writing Cross-Platform PowerShell, and I met many wonderful people in the data community. Though I’m a self-declared SQL-adjacent, they were very welcoming.

Lightning Talks

I attended a session with several lightning talks, two of which relate directly to this article: The Benefits of Mentoring by Deborah Melkin and Blogging: Lessons Learned the Hard Way by Jason Romans .

The latter talk inspired me to just write articles and not focus on minutia that only serves to prevent me from posting an article. The former talk and the T-SQL Tuesday blog invitation, also by Deb, is about mentorship, and I wanted to share my experience of being a mentor and a mentee.

Mentorship

Over the course of my career, I’ve freely shared the information that I’ve learned with many others, including team members and the general community. Blogging and speaking at conferences is just one way to share knowledge. Mentoring is another way and, unfortunately, it is often overlooked.

Entering a mentorship, whether the mentor or the mentee, requires commitment of time and self. Many new members of the community (any community) may feel uncomfortable to initiate a conversation about mentorship. The PowerShell and SQL/data communities are both recognized as very welcoming and inclusive communities. Asking someone about a mentorship would likely be met with an outpouring of names or places (online or in person) that can assist.

I’ve been a mentee more than a few times over the course of my career (and really even prior to it). The lessons I learned were invaluable in shaping my perspective and ultimately my career. Thanks Jeff Hicks for all the pointers you’ve shared over the years!

And I’ve been a mentor a few times over the years. A couple of the mentees stand above the rest.

Mentee One

The earliest one in my career was much less of a formal mentorship. In fact, it turned out that he saw my day today job duties and he wanted to be able to do the same thing. Of course, I trained him in the ways of the SysAdmin. Nearly 2 decades later we still keep in touch and as I’ve grown in my career, I’ve shared my ongoing perspective with him.

Mentee Two

The second mentee that stands out the most is quite recent. At my work, we have a paid internship program and a bright young woman was selected for our team. I was asked to bring her technical skills up to par so she could be a contributing member of the team. It wasn’t like she was a clean slate in that she had already done some programming in her coursework and another internship, I believe.

While there were no explicitly defined goals, being a contributing member of the team was my guideline. We spent many hours on Zoom calls with me explaining various technologies, and also providing general career guidance, such as letting her know that her career is hers and not her employers that the job belongs to the employer. I shared with her several of the influencers that I follow, but I suggested that she should find other women in the technology space to follow as their voices might resonate more with her.

I asked her if she could share with me a statement about our mentorship, and here are her thoughts.

Dave jump-started my career with his stellar mentorship. He went through company-specific workflows and general knowledge about IIS, AWS, Chef, and other tools I needed to be familiar with on the job, always patient and encouraging.

He made me feel like I had the chops to succeed, and encouraged me to persevere knowing I might run into people who doubted my skills (quite unfairly) due to my gender. This did happen every now and then, but the encouragement and hard skills Dave imparted to me made me immune (or at least less susceptible) to such inadvertent knock-downs.

He encouraged me to be a clear communicator, and showed me what that looked like. At not yet two years at the company, I am now a lead of my team - and I owe a huge amount of that success to Dave.

No One is Perfect

Even with these success stories and others, I know that I’ve had a few failures. I’m not sure where the fault lay, but perhaps it was more training than mentoring. Have experienced something that just did not have the eagerness and thirst for learning, or perhaps I let my own biases get in the way.

Summary

I do enjoy sharing my perspective of my extensive career and helping others make the most of theirs. While I would like to mentor others in the tech community, I really don’t have the spare time this summer. And I don’t want to commit without being sure I can fulfill that commitment.

One day, I certainly would like to mentor again (outside of work), to take on a protege, and to help those that ask. I want to do my part to help the community(ies) soar beyond the clouds.