I have done years of mentoring; beginning with raising four children, continuing to mentor as a manager in a business environment, extending career mentoring as a volunteer for several organizations, refining my mentoring skills as senior staff, and imparting my knowledge through experience, observation, and refinement of techniques in the “school-of-hard-knocks”.  Now my desire is to provide the career mentoring knowledge and skills needed by individuals and their organizations as a one-stop-shop for exactly what is desired: just-in-time, relevant learning.  My career has greatly benefited from formal and informal workplace mentoring over the years.  Even today, l look back at the phenomenal wisdom imparted to me by many individuals plus, books, magazines, the internet, and face-to-face learning. The information and feedback was invaluable!
It is time to give back to OUR world, the GOOD our world has given to US!
My motivations to be a career mentor:

• Ability to share skills, knowledge, and expertise.
• Learning what works and doesn’t work in unique situations with challenging personalities different from my own.
• Satisfaction in knowing a mentee suffered one less frustration because they have the knowledge, skills, abilities, and tools to turn the frustration into an opportunity for success!
  • The “high’ from solving a struggle, circumventing a hurdle, generates such positive energy for the mentee AND mentor!
• Developing personal connections.
• The challenge of developing workplace mentoring programs and career mentoring programs tailored to the needs of individuals.

 
I’ve always had an interest in how people and groups think, act, and interact with each other, perhaps due to my parent’s knowledge and practice of psychology and experimentation to achieve successful outcomes. Workplace mentoring programs and career mentoring programs are a natural channel for the parallel path I proceeded along during my focused career.  I will continue to observe and listen to constructive feedback from your career mentoring experiences, what I as a co-founder have visibility to view, and tweak what we can to make YOU successful!
By Eileen Arnold

Back in 2015, when we had developed an initial version of our MyCareerMentor product, I thought we had a short distance to go to before we launched our first product: do an alpha test, make some refinements, do a beta test, make a few more changes, and then launch.  Well, the path of progress did not turn out to be a quick one. 

But in hindsight, I consider us lucky -- we got so much good feedback from our alpha and beta testers that our product has improved a great deal from that early version.

​Early in my own career, it became clear to me that there were many things I needed to learn, and many skills I needed to have.  I set about this learning process with lots of energy and enthusiasm.  The major approach I used was trial and error – I tried doing something new, and noticed whether it worked.  When it did not work, which happened more often than not, I would notice that it had not worked, and try something else.  Gradually, over many years, I acquired the knowledge and skills I needed to be successful in my career.  In hindsight, my career progress would have been much quicker if I had had guidance over time to help me understand what specific knowledge and skills I needed next.

This is our very first blog post.
 ConsideredThoughtfully.com is just starting the process of evaluating the feasibility of our approach to offering advice and counsel to people interested in advancing in their careers via an online mentoring app.  So our current status is pre-launch.  We plan to describe our philosophy and approach to career advice in future blog posts, and offer you the opportunity to sign up to try out our service within the next few months.
Written by Dorothy McKinney, founder and CEO of ConsideredThoughtfully.