While beefing up your career skills, mentoring is proven to be essential for your career success. There are several mentors to utilize that range from CEOs to CMOs to college professionals. These people are instrumental to your career growth and success. They offer their time, care and commitment to improving your skills.

Great mentors have the knowledge and experience to guide a protégé or mentee. Mentors are valuable because they guide you on your career path. Whether you are an experienced professional or recent college grad, mentors are a valuable asset in your career toolkit.

How will you get started on creating a relationship with your mentor? Below are among the simple approaches to strengthen your career skills:

Determine the Mentorship Goals

Before you seek out a mentor, write down all your expectations and the role that you like your mentor to play in your life. Do you like a mentor who can help you with installing networking attempts? Do you like a mentor who can assist you in learning more about a particular industry? Or, do you like someone that provides guidance on how to be a real and successful entrepreneur? Are there areas of experience or specific skills in your career that further need improvement?

It is crucial to determine your set of objectives and goals. This is for you and your mentor to achieve together.

Recognize a Good Mentor

While trying to discover a good mentor, make way to look for someone that can aid in your personal growth. In addition, look for someone who is truly brilliant and has found success in many areas.

The most obvious mentor candidates are current and former bosses, college professors with whom you can establish a good relationship. They are the leaders that can beef up your career skills in any field of work.

In the entire process, bear in mind that you are not limited to a single mentor. You can choose to have a mentor for each stage of your career. There are multiple mentors that specialize in different areas.

Request for Mentorship

It is easy to approach a mentor candidate when you have known the person and have built an existing relationship with him or her. You can easily ask this person for meetings, whether at a coffee shop or in the office environment.

Communicate all of your career goals and identify some of the areas that you want to improve on. Explain that you have a high regard for your mentor’s specific leadership, experience and skills. You would like to take the opportunity of learning from her or him. There is nothing wrong with asking this person to become your mentor.

If you do not personally know a person, it is a bit difficult but is not impossible to approach them for mentorship. The leadership and intelligence of a mentor can provide you with good insights on beefing up your career skills. You must be ready and motivated as a student being mentored.

Here are the other ways of approaching a potential mentor that you do not know personally:

• Ask a mutual friend for you to be introduced to a mentor. Establish mutual connections over the internet through LinkedIn, or ask particular people in the network if they know potential mentors.
• Contact a mentor. One of the most direct ways of contacting a potential mentor is through email. If you cannot get an email address, you can try reaching out with social networks, like a Facebook message or Twitter. If you still do not hear back, you can still follow up. Be more persistent; however, do not be annoying.
• Explore the different ways to crossing paths with your mentor. If your mentor is an online influencer, a professional organization member or conference speaker, you have to attend online and live public events. You must not stalk this mentor, but instead, be proactive about the opportunities where you have the opportunity of meeting your mentor. If you are well-acquainted with the potential mentor, the important element is to show admiration on the things that he or she does. You also need to show enthusiasm for growth.