By AJ Picard — I run Sauce Designs & Clava App
It’s been a month since I’ve brought on our first design intern to help out with tasks for both Sauce Designs & Clava App. Before I started recruiting our first intern I was doing a ton of research on how to be great mentor.
There were so many articles I went over that provided a bunch of valuable information & tips to use. In this article I wanted to share what I’ve done so far throughout this process.
Here are the three rules I live by when it comes to mentorship so far:
- Prepare
- Encourage
- Teach
Rule #1 — Prepare
Before our intern officially came on board I created a page in Craft (www.Craft.do ) that contained all of account login information that the intern would need access to. By the way I use Craft & Notion to keep my businesses organized, if you haven’t checked out these apps I suggest you do. You can view a review I did on Notion here, I will be doing a review on Craft soon (give me a follow so you don’t miss out).
Anyway, back to what we were talking about… I created a page for the intern that would contain their goals, articles/resources they can explore, along with their tasks.
I wanted to have all of this ready to go so that the intern wouldn’t waste any time looking for account information or anything else that would disrupt their onboarding experience.
This helped save time in the long run and it makes your company look more organized/put together.
On top of putting these documents/pages together I went ahead and found the times in both our schedules that we could sit down and have 1 on 1 meetings. I aim for at least 3 times a week or more and at the minimum these meetings last an hour, some extend to 2–3 hours.
During these meetings we talk about the designs the intern has created from the tasks I assigned to them. We also breakdown strategies for marketing, design and development since these are all industries a designer can impact.
For the most part though, each meeting consists of us breaking down the designs that were created. I let the intern explain…
