From mentee to mentor: supporting the next generation of MCIOBs
After being mentored through his own CIOB membership application, Ian Fielden MCIOB decided to give back by becoming a mentor himself.
Starting his professional review to become a member of the CIOB, Ian Fielden MCIOB says he was confident he had the required experience but was unsure about how to use that experience to best describe his capabilities. He initially decided to start by tackling one module, but his first attempt was more than three times over the word limit. “I thought no, this doesn't work, I'll look for a mentor,” he says.
He was connected through the mentoring programme with Karl Chapman MCIOB, who took a more methodical approach, breaking down the process into manageable chunks and focusing on one competency at a time. “He was very, very good,” Ian says. “He said ‘look, let's get one right because the writing style is completely different to anything you will have ever done before,’ which it is.”
“It took probably two or three weeks to get through that first one, going backwards and forwards making sure that I’d got the wording and the style right as much as anything. And then we set off and we were producing probably two or three every couple of weeks. I think it took me about three months in the end to get everything together and get it agreed with Karl.”
Once he had passed his professional review, Ian decided to carry on the process by volunteering as a mentor himself. “I suddenly realised that, if Karl’s helping me out the goodness of his heart and this is free time he's given, it would be good to pay it forward, as it were.”
Ian had already helped mentor around 15 to 20 trainee quantity surveyors (QS) throughout his career, with one recently becoming a senior QS, and decided to use this experience to mentor prospective CIOB members.
Become a mentor or mentee
Mentoring process
Most of the support involves walking mentees through how to arrange their answers in the Circumstance, Action, Result, Learning (CARL) format, while ensuring they keep to the word limit and, most importantly, follow the guidance notes.
“I tend to let people ramble at first, to get the story in, and then cut it back,” Ian says. “It becomes difficult when somebody's obviously got a tight timeline, but I always try and make sure that we only ever do one or maybe two at the beginning, get them absolutely right in terms of the wording, word count, and structure, and then allowing them to build. You’ve got to remember that the end result will be around 9,000 words, it’s very focussed; effectively it’s a dissertation level piece of work about you and your experience.”
Part of the process is reminding applicants that they don’t need to be perfect in every aspect of construction to apply for membership. “You just need to be able to talk about how the various sections relate to your job role,” he says.
Benefits of mentoring
As well as supporting the applicants, Ian says he has also seen the benefits of mentoring.
“I enjoy seeing people progress and be successful, I've always enjoyed that,” he says. “The other has been being able to pay it forward. Karl didn't have to do for me what he did for me. I think without his help I would have struggled. And that's why I enjoy being a mentor in as much as you can see people who look at this and go ‘I don't even know where to start’ and you give them an outline of where to go and all of a sudden you can see the penny drop and it starts building.”
Mentoring has also provided an opportunity to learn more about other aspects of the sector that Ian wouldn’t necessarily have had insight into.
“When you're working as a mentor, you're picking up on other people's experience,” he says. “I've not been involved in house building for 30 years. I've had two QSs recently in this process who are house builders, so going through the process with them and understanding how they're working these days, it's been really quite interesting.”
One mentee was also working in Riyadh and was able to tell Ian about how the sector works in Saudi Arabia. “Looking at the work she was doing out in Riyadh and how the construction world works somewhere else was great fun,” he says. “It's dead easy to become blinkered in terms of the job that you're in day-to-day and it's really quite nice to be seeing what other people are doing and how they're fairing, all while helping them achieve their MCIOB.”