Can You Carve Out Ten Hours to Support a Mentee’s Career?
NEWIEE surveys and direct inquiries regularly inform us that women involved in NEWIEE are actively seeking a mentor. For some women, the opportunity to find a mentor is the primary reason they get involved with NEWIEE. Today, the need for mentoring is especially great. With so few opportunities to connect with colleagues in person, and virtual interactions often being completely transactional, it has been challenging to establish and maintain a relationship with a mentor over the last few years. For many women, that challenge has been compounded since they are carrying an extra weight of caring for family members in the ongoing pandemic – with notable demands on both our time and our energy.

Will you sign up as a mentor for a NEWIEE member?
Even if your initial reaction is that you don’t have time, I hope you will consider carefully whether you can make time for one meeting each month, over a period of six months, to participate in NEWIEE’s mentor-mentee matching program. What we have heard from those who have participated both as mentors and as mentees is that each learns from the other, and it is typically a mutually rewarding experience. Note that even if you are a few years into a career in the energy or environment space, you can be helpful to a young professional just starting in her career.

Six years of matchups!
As context, we are launching into the sixth year of NEWIEE’s highly successful mentor-mentee pairing program. This will operate in a similar way to last year’s matchups program, with a few small tweaks to improve it yet further!

Here is how you can participate, either as a mentor or a mentee:
This month, NEWIEE is recruiting women mentors – we seek to create a cohort that includes women with a variety of career paths (e.g., women in the trades, engineering, energy development, sales, energy policy, environmental) as well as a racially diverse group.

As in prior rounds, mentors will commit to being available to meet (virtually) at least once/month over a six-month period. After six months, the mentor and mentee may choose to continue if they wish, but there is no assumption that their commitment goes beyond six months.

In April, we will list mentors with short bios on our website, and will invite potential mentees to complete a short application that describes who their top two choices of mentor would be and what they hope to learn from them. Based on that information, NEWIEE will create mentor-mentee pairs, and will launch the interactions with guidance for the participants to follow. We will send ideas for discussion topics or activities that mentors and mentees can enjoy and learn from together. We will reach out for feedback from both mentors and mentees at the end of the six months.

While I often feel that my days are consumed by family and work needs, I keep on working to squeeze out a little time regularly for conversations that are focused on supporting and advising mid- and early-career women in energy and the environment. I myself have benefitted massively from mentoring (and continue to do so), and it is a great pleasure to pass that benefit along to amazing women who are earlier in their careers in the energy and environment sectors.

Will you spend a little time with a mentee every month for six months to be a champion for women in the energy and environment?

Jacquie Ashmore
NEWIEE Membership Committee Co-Chair

Also of Interest

• NEWIEE 2023 Mentorship Program
• NEWIEE’s Job’s Board
• Get Involved with NEWIEE