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Toolkit and reference

Guidance for mentors

How to be useful to a candidate: what to look at, what to say, and where your role stops.

Who this is for:Mentors

Most candidates who struggle are not short of ability. They are short of someone who will read their draft properly and tell them the truth about it.

What ICE says about mentors for a Career Appraisal

Institution of Civil Engineers

  • A mentor can be any senior engineer who is able, and can make the commitment, to provide guidance. If possible they should also be an ICE Member at the equivalent grade or higher than the grade being applied for.
  • They should understand ICE's procedures and standards so they can assess the candidate's competence and advise on the application.
  • It helps if they are familiar with the candidate's work, and they must verify and sign the cover page of the Career Appraisal report.
  • Having a mentor is not compulsory, but it strengthens an application because the mentor can verify the information in the report.
  • Where a candidate has a mentor for their Career Appraisal, that person should if possible be their lead sponsor for the Professional Review.

From Career Appraisal Guidance, Institution of Civil Engineers.

The three things a mentor can do that nobody else will

Say the evidence is not there. Colleagues are kind, and line managers have an interest in believing their engineers are ready. A mentor who says "you have no commercial evidence and you will not get it in three months" is doing the single most valuable thing available.

Read the draft as a reviewer would. Not for typographical errors. For whether the candidate is visible in it — whether any sentence could have been written by anyone else on the project.

Ask the second question. Candidates rehearse their answers. What they have not rehearsed is the follow-up: "and what would have changed your mind?" That is where preparation actually happens.

A useful rhythm

  1. 01

    Start with the gaps, not the report

    Do the gap analysis separately — you grade their evidence, they grade their own — and compare. The divergence is the conversation. Mentors typically rate candidates lower on commercial and higher on leadership than candidates rate themselves.

  2. 02

    Agree development actions with dates

    Two areas, not seven. Named responsibilities, not courses. A date to review.

  3. 03

    Read a structure before you read prose

    A list of decisions and a word budget is quicker to fix than 5,000 words. Catching a structural problem at the outline stage saves weeks.

  4. 04

    Read the full draft properly, once, early

    Early enough that a rewrite is possible. A careful read two weeks before the deadline is proofreading with extra anxiety.

  5. 05

    Run a mock interview, then another one

    The first tells them what it feels like. The second is where they actually improve. Push on the weakest attribute, not the strongest.

  6. 06

    Be honest about readiness

    If they are not ready, say so, say why, and say what would change it. That conversation is uncomfortable and it is worth more than a year of encouragement.

Giving feedback on a draft

Worth doing

  • Mark every 'we' that should be an 'I'.
  • Ask 'what did you decide here?' in the margin wherever you cannot find a decision.
  • Say which attribute area you could not find evidence for.
  • Tell them which paragraph you would question them on, and why.
  • Check the report against the CV for consistency.
  • Point out where a claim is stronger than the work supports.

Avoid

  • Rewrite passages for them. It must be their own work, and ICE is explicit about that.
  • Give them a previous candidate's report to model on.
  • Only comment on grammar. It is the easiest feedback to give and the least useful.
  • Tell them they will be fine unless you have read it.
  • Confirm that an attribute is achieved. Only ICE determines that.

Related pages and tools

Read the official guidance