Importance of mentors and mentorship programs to professional development
Throughout history, humans evolved and improved themselves by learning from past experiences. Each generation passed their experiences to the next to avoid the mistakes done by the previous generations, and improve upon them. This allowed humans to develop their wisdom and intellect as a collective.

Parents look after their children and teach them what is good and what is bad. The initial moral compass of a child is built up by their parents. At school teachers provide an abundance of education to improve their knowledge and skills. If someone wants to learn a sport, there are coaches to guide them. One can obtain guidance on almost any subject humans can do, to initiate the work they want to do. This experience-sharing process contributes to human evolution tremendously.
Like parents guide their kids and like teachers guide their students, who would guide the young professionals and undergraduates who are entering the professional world? Are they fine on their own? I’d say that they need someone to obtain guidance and share experiences as they enter into unknown territory.
According to the oxford dictionary, the definition for the word mentor as follows.
1. An experienced and trusted adviser.
1.1 An experienced person in a company or educational institution who trains and counsels new employees or students.
Two important words that need to be highlighted here are ‘experienced’ and ‘trusted’. A mentor can be junior in age but always superior in experience regarding the subject they provide mentoring. Also, the mentoring should come from a credible place. If the source is not trustworthy, one should not consider such a source as a mentor. One such place is Youtube. All the advice from untrusted and unverified sources should be taken with a grain of salt and practiced with caution.

Bridging the gap between the academic and professional world
One of the common problems among undergraduates is a lack of industry knowledge. Because of this, landing their first job can be quite a challenging task. Not understanding the difference of expectations within industry and academia makes the situation worse. In an academic environment, undergraduates obtain advanced hard skills and industries are looking for persons with soft skills. A good mentor can help to solve these issues and help find the right balance between soft and hard skills.
A good mentor understands the situation of mentees by listening to their stories and provide guidance to overcome challenges faced by mentees when entering the professional world. Mentor save their mentee from learning the ‘Hard Way’, which is trial and error. Mentorship programs build up confidence among undergraduates to better present themselves to the industry. Employers are also benefiting by having well-suited employees take up job opportunities.
Molding freshers to well-equipped professionals
When a fresh graduate secures their first job, the first thing they must do is to understand their role in the working place. One can be very skillful but no one can act independently within a company as it has a collective mission. Therefore, fresh employees have to go through a training program. A supervisor is appointed to provide necessary guidance to these freshers to carry out their work.
Although traditional training programs and supervisors provide the required training, they tend to limit creativity among freshmen. If the training program is replaced by a mentorship program and the supervisor is replaced by a mentor, creativity can be retained while providing guidance. In that way, a company can get maximum out from its employees by making them more satisfied with their work and the support they are getting.
Not so long ago, I was able to secure a place in the ScholarX 2021 program, an exclusive 6-month mentorship program aimed at the selected pool of undergraduates based in Sri Lanka, organized by the Sustainable Education Foundation.
After few virtual sessions with my mentor Dr. Sumudu Tennakoon, I realized the importance of a mentor and what change can a mentor cause to a mentee in going forward in their life. Inspired by the works of my mentor, I wrote this article and I would like to thank Dr. Sumudu Tennakoon and SEF for organizing a program like this to elevate the standard of Sri Lankan graduates.