Sharing knowledge and inspiration is equally important in our professional spheres. It can foster vision in others and strengthen professional ties. When you share with others, it helps deepen your own knowledge and engrains what you know. New conversations and opportunities can arise just from that gesture, offering even more opportunities to grow.

About two months ago, Melania Omonte and Eugenia Rossi asked me to “mentor” them in Artificial Intelligence. I had many mentors in my life, but the ones that made the greatest impact on my life are those who made me see that a mentor is nothing more than someone who sits and learns next to you. And that’s how, in a dialogue between three women, a challenge emerged, a commitment to spend time together learning, stumbling on mistakes, problems, in the middle of this pandemic.

What we decided to learn.

After proposing several courses to take, and books to read, we decided to take a course on “Developing AI Models in Microsoft Azure” and one of the books that a mentor suggested me “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John C. Maxwell.

The commitment.

We don’t all have the same learning speed, and we don’t all have the time or the same hardware to work with. So the first commitment we made as a team was, to always wait for each other so we can move forward always together.

We also promised to move forward with one chapter of the course and two of the book per week, each of us did it in her spare time and then we discussed the problems encountered and also discussed our reflection regarding the leadership book.

The result.

We completed the course, with thousands of stumbles, errors, compatibility problems, bugs, etc. And we were solving everything together along the way … we learned … and we learned more than what the course indicated. Because everything did not turn out perfect, because we could not solve everything as indicated in the course and especially because we realized that we still have much more to learn.

Eugenia started her own blog! You can check the tutorials of all lessons learned in the following links:

• So… what is AI?
• Developing AI Models in Microsoft Azure
• Install tools and setup Conda
• Setup Azure ML SDK
• Create Azure ML Workspace
• Working with config files
• Lets train an AI Model

Conclusion

The benefits of mentoring are overwhelmingly positive for everyone involved. Mentoring and being mentored boost the development of leadership and management skills for both parties. We often hear the reasons people give for not becoming a mentor like: I don’t have time.  I don’t have the right skills.  My personality isn’t suitable.

Before you pull out a reason to say “no”, consider first these reason to say “yes” to being a mentor.

• Do you remember a teacher, a coach or a former boss who said or did something that changed the trajectory of your life? Being a mentor is your chance to do that for someone else.  Not every mentoring partnership is life changing but every mentor has the potential to instigate surprising change.
• There is no better way to embed knowledge than through teaching.
• Mentorship is a two-way street. Mentoring is both satisfying and a way to pay it forward to those who will be running things in the future.