Importance of mentoring

Lack of individual attention and guidance for students has pushed me and my friend to design a program that would meet this need of Kosovo youngsters. We called it Mentoring our Future, because we believe that mentoring plays a crucial role in the lives of each of us, not only career-wise but also in personal choices. Even more when the people who mentor youngsters have gone through the same challenges, most of them coming from the same country and have achieved a lot in their lives. This program’s goal is to allow each student to receive individual attention and guidance related to their professional development goals, career aspirations and networking needs.

Mentoring our Future (MoF) program is a mentoring program designed for Kosovo students. This program will serve as a meeting point of professionals and as an exchanging space of their professional experience. This networking mechanism is an address where the community will communicate and benefit in different fields. Only in the first year of the mentoring program 2018-2019, we have 43 mentors and 41 mentees in our database, who were paired to start their first sessions in September 2018.

With the support of IPKO Foundation, through the Sponsorship Programme, we were able to organize two training, in April 2019 and on June 2019. Training topics were on: ‘Soft Skills’ and ‘Academic Writing and Research Methods’. These topics were identified also as a request from the students as very important ones to be tackled during the program. ‘Soft Skills’ training gathered program mentees who followed lectures and practical examples from the trainer with the purpose to improve their pitching and presentation skills, body language, public speaking skills, communication and negotiation skills. With ‘Academic Writing and Research Methods’ training, mentees learned how to avoid plagiarism, how to summarize and paraphrase paragraphs, interviewing techniques, collecting, processing and analyzing data. There was also a special session on the technique called ‘Points of You’. This technique helped the students to express their ambition and the obstacles encountered in achieving them. These were achieved through photos and their representation, where students tried to identify their potentials and the goals they want to achieve. They also made their wish list on what they want to accomplish and how they will accomplish them during the year 2019.

Also, with the support of the Programme, there will be a final event for mentees organized, to deliver the training certificates to them. This event will gather all the mentors, mentees, and different partners of the program and other potential partners that this program can cooperate with in the future. This Scholarship Programme has given extra support to us and the mentees of the program, to find additional ways in increasing their capacities besides the monthly mentoring sessions they have with their mentors. This scholarship is much appreciated as an initiative as one can use it based on the needs, and it does not ask to shape any activity differently from what you have put forward in your plan.

Vjosa Morina
Mentoring our Future