1 What have I learned?
This course has covered a wide range of topics relating to mentoring and coaching. Some of the themes may be more familiar to you than others, but hopefully each week has offered ideas and suggestions that are relevant and interesting.
You’ll start this week with an activity that encourages you to look back over the course and reflect on what you’ve learned each week.
Activity 1 Pulling it all together
Review your notes and responses to each activity, then summarise your key learning points in the boxes below. These notes don’t need to be too detailed – thinking in bullet points should help to capture the key points.
If you have printed out the PDF document of all your answers to the activities, refer to that now. If you haven’t and would like to, choose the option ‘Download your answers for the documents on this course’ on the left-hand side of the page.
Week 7
Comment
Summarising your learning in one place should illustrate how your knowledge and understanding of mentoring and coaching has developed over the last eight weeks. You can now use that to work out your next steps.
As you learned in Week 2, self-reflection plays an important part in the mentoring and coaching process, boosting your learning and development. So, the more you can practise this technique, the more proficient you will become.
What did your summarising in Activity 1 show you? For example, you may have decided that you need a mentor and have already identified some specific issues you could discuss with them. Hopefully you’ll also have some ideas about who you’d like to approach.
Alternatively, you may have decided that a coach is for you. Perhaps the self-awareness activities in Week 2 have made you realise that you need some help pinpointing what you want to do next in your career.
Or maybe you have decided that you’d like to be a mentor or a coach. If so, this course will have given you a useful insight into the skills and aptitudes you will need.
In the next section, you’ll narrow down your options further and start to plan your next move.