Invest Immigrant Mentorship

Mentor Guidelines & Code of Conduct

Role as a Mentor:

• Establish how you can reach your mentee: by phone, e-mail, or fax, or at a designated meeting location. Establish a time and phone number where you can usually answer calls or make contact. Mentees may need encouragement to leave messages on your voicemail to confirm meetings as well as to cancel them.

• Help your mentee understand Canadian workplace culture and help them build a network in Saint John by introducing them to relevant individuals in the business community.

• Help your mentee gain confidence in new social situations and a new society, culture and workplace dynamic.

• Help set realistic expectations and goals for your mentee. Set some specific short and long term goals at the beginning of the relationship. These are to be entirely defined by mentor and mentee as needs of every relationship will be different.

• Present information carefully and give all points of view a fair hearing. Listen carefully and offer possible solutions without passing judgment. Think of ways to problem solve together.

• Influence your mentee through constructive feedback. The mentor empowers the mentee to make right decisions without actually deciding for the mentee. Identify the mentee’s interests and take them seriously. Explore positive and negative consequences.

• Help locate work-related resources; guide and advise in matters of licensing/accreditation.

• Identify skills that the mentee needs to work on that are relevant to their field or that are demanded by the market.

• Provide the mentee with access to information about their area of work, any stand-out issues in Canadian practice.

• Mentors are not responsible for securing employment for their mentee.

Program Rules:

• Discussions between you and your mentee are confidential.

• If you have a concern you feel is beyond your ability to handle, call the program coordinator, even if it seems trivial.