Coaching and mentoring exist with the whole purpose of helping someone so that they can grow to their full potential. But, there are many differences between coaching and mentoring. However, both the terms are physiologically similar when used in organizations. So it’s essential to understand their differences and start using both words separately. So if you are wondering what differences can be there between coaching and mentoring, you are at the right place. In this article, we have listed a few differences between coaching and mentoring and how you can use them in various ways for career development.
What is Mentoring?
A mentor is a person who passes his experiences, guides or advises a mentee to be better in their career. Mentoring takes time as a mentor takes time to understand you and your challenges and advise you based on their personal experiences to help you achieve your goal. Mentoring comes with benefits like increasing self-confidence, increasing your communication skills, and giving you a new perspective towards your problems. Also, better mentor can brings better return on your investments.
What is Coaching?
A coach is someone who will support you in one specific career development goal. There can be different coaching styles to prioritize your improvement areas or break down your goal into smaller ones to achieve them. Coaching is a more structured and tailored teaching method where a coach charges for their services compared with mentoring.
Key Difference Between Coaching And Mentoring
Duration of Time
A mentoring is a long-term relationship, and sometimes they convert into friendships also. Once you have that connection with the mentor, they can help you with other goals also. At the same time, coaching is a short-term relationship because they are objective-driven and are in a more structured form where as mentoring can be a worthwhile investment.
Advice and Guidance
In mentoring, the advice and guidance are all about listening, learning, and advising, which is soft and more relationship-focused guidance. Whereas in coaching, the advising and direction are all about the structured teaching style depending on the coaching style. So hopefully, now you know the difference between coaching and mentoring to choose the style of guidance according to your career goal.
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