How-To Guide · 7 min read
Key Takeaways
- In an unsettled field, mentor for the skill or the decision rather than for the job title.
- Adjacent fields that solved a similar problem a decade earlier are usually more useful than the few people inside yours.
- Several partial mentors covering different parts of the question tend to beat waiting for one who covers all of it.
- Someone two or three years ahead in an emerging field often knows more that is current than someone twenty years ahead in a neighbouring one.
In This Guide
The short answer: stop searching for someone who holds the role you want, since in an emerging field that person may not exist, and search instead for people who have solved the specific problems your path contains. The rest of this guide is how to find them and what to ask.
Mentor for the Skill, Not the Job Title
A job title is a summary of a set of skills that happened to be bundled together at a particular moment. In a field that is still forming, the bundles keep changing, which is why searching by title returns so little. The underlying skills are considerably more stable than the roles built out of them.
Break what you want to be able to do into its parts, then find someone who is genuinely good at each part, regardless of what their role is called or which industry they sit in. The result is a more useful set of conversations than any single title-matched mentor would have produced.
Pro TipWrite down the three or four things you actually want to get good at. Search on those, not on the role you imagine holding.
Look One Field Sideways Rather Than One Rung Up
Emerging fields tend to recapitulate problems that older fields have already worked through. The questions of how to establish credibility without an established qualification, how to price work nobody has a benchmark for, or how to build a career across a boundary that institutions do not recognise yet are not new questions, even when your field is.
Identify a field that faced a structurally similar situation a decade or two earlier and look for people who navigated it there. They will not know your technical content, and that is fine, because what you need from them is the shape of the problem rather than its specifics.
Take the People Slightly Ahead Seriously
Conventional mentoring advice pushes towards seniority, and in a fast-moving field seniority can mean distance from current practice. Someone two or three years ahead of you is working with the tools, expectations and entry routes that actually exist now, and they remember the decisions you are facing because they made them recently.
They are also far more likely to respond, and the relationship tends to be more reciprocal, which makes it easier to sustain. A near-peer mentor is a genuine category rather than a consolation prize, and in an unsettled field it is frequently the most valuable one available.
Assemble Several Partial Mentors
The search for one mentor who covers everything is what keeps people waiting. In a field without a defined path, that person almost certainly does not exist, and holding out for them costs years.
Accept partial coverage deliberately instead. One person who understands the technical work, one who has built a reputation from nothing in an adjacent space, one who knows how the institutions in your area actually make hiring decisions. None of them is your mentor in the singular sense, and together they are considerably more useful than one would be.
Pro TipDifferent people for different questions is not a failure to find the right mentor. In an emerging field it is the correct structure.
Make the Ambiguity the Reason for the Conversation
Most people asking for mentorship arrive with a request for direction, and in an undefined field nobody can give it. What experienced people can do well is help you think about how to decide, which is a different and more answerable question.
So ask about judgement rather than answers. How they evaluated an opportunity with incomplete information, what they would look for if they were entering now, which of their early assumptions turned out to be wrong. Those questions are answerable by someone who has never held your intended role, and the answers transfer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I look for mentors outside my country?
Often yes, particularly in emerging fields where the relevant work may be concentrated somewhere else entirely. A field with few practitioners locally may have a substantial community internationally, and remote mentoring is unremarkable now in a way it was not a few years ago.
What if the people ahead of me are competitors?
In a small field this is a genuine consideration, and the usual answer is to look slightly further out, to people in the same space but a different market, sector or geography. They understand the problem without having any stake in your specific opportunities.
How do I approach someone whose work I only know online?
Reference something specific they have made or written, say what you took from it, and ask a narrow question rather than for mentorship in general. Specificity is what distinguishes your message from the many generic ones they receive.
Is it worth having a mentor in a field I might leave?
Yes, and the conversation about whether to leave is one of the more valuable ones you can have. A mentor who helps you conclude that a field is not right has saved you considerably more than one who helps you advance in the wrong one.